Visitors interact with Darrin Martin's Ancestral Songs during the opening reception for Recoding CripTech. Photograph by Richard Lomibao.
Co-curated with Lindsey D. Felt, Recoding CripTech re-imagined enshrined notions of what a body can be or do through creative technologies, and how it can movie, look, or communicate. Working with a broad understanding of technology, from prostheses to the built environment, it explored how disability - and artists who identify as such - can redefine design, aesthetics, and the relationship between user and interface. Exhibiting artists engaged with technology in manifold ways from conception to production and beyond. As the term "crip" reclaims the word for disability culture and recognizes disability as a cultural and political identity, so too do artists hack technologies to make them more accessible and inclusive.
Exhibition documentation of Recoding CripTech, featuring Jillian Crochet's My Beating Heart, Sonia Soberats' Ben and Death Watch, Allison Leigh Holt's A Living Model of Hyperbolic Space, and part of Darrin Martin's Ancestral Songs. Photograph by Richard Lomibao
"The exhibition is thus both a lab for reimagining more accessible interfaces in exhibition design, and a curatorial argument about technology and identity, highlighting how hacking plays a vital role in crip culture."
Workshop leader Georgina Kleege interacts with Jennifer Justice's haptic installation The Foot Knows the Foot When it touches the Earth. Photograph by Richard Lomibao.
"Among the themes that drive the exhibition, one is preeminent: disability is not a pathological state in need of correction. Realized with old and new technologies alike, the objects and discrete installations comprising Recoding CripTech do not demonstrate a desire to correct the range of challenges each maker lives with. Quite the opposite, in fact. These projects proudly assert disability as a cultural and political identity that demands recognition from non-disabled populations."
- Rouha Seikaly, KQED Arts review