Abler. Archive | notebook

what is universal design?

I’ve been emailing a bunch with Aimi Hamraie, soon to finish her Ph.D. at Emory University. Aimi’s researching universal design and disability politics in the built environment, among other things. We have a lot to talk about, and I’m hoping to post a long exchange between us here. It was Aimi’s research that pointed me [...]

recognizing openness

“Popular science, media representations, pundits, and futurologists all portray our own moment in history as one of maximal turbulence, on the cusp of an epochal change, on a verge between the security of a past now fading and the insecurity of a future we can only dimly discern. In the face of this view of [...]

see yourself sensing

Black Dog sent me Madeline Schwartzman’s new See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception: Lots of great projects in here—many I’ve not seen before. Plenty of both high- and low-tech projects and with a sense of history and breadth. And the critical analysis is also well done—she groups these projects together to show their raucous investigative [...]

christine sun kim is unlearning sound etiquette

Filmmaker Todd Selby profiles Christine Sun Kim‘s performance work. From the description on the Nowness site: Deaf from birth, Kim turned to using sound as a medium during an artist residency in Berlin in 2008, and has since developed a practice of lo-fi experimentation that aims to re-appropriate sound by translating it into movement and [...]

the importance of being a cyborg ableist

This article in H+ emphasizes the importance of embracing technology to further the cause of women’s equality in contemporary society. This is the kind of essay where you could almost swap out the feminist terminology for that of disability rights, with very few changes. Kyle Munkittrick lays out nicely the stakes for the cyber-feminist in [...]

EDGE lab

The Experimental Design and Gaming Environments lab, or EDGE lab, at Ryerson University, works—among other things—on adaptive tech for children with disabilities. Like the High-Low Tech media lab group where I’m taking a course now, EDGE researchers are committed to democratizing materials for maximum customization and replicability. Following the example of the Adaptive Design Association [...]

"curiosity is a vice"

“…that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes “concern”; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to break up our familiarities and [...]

material interfaces, part ii

First, just quickly: I’m quoted in Monday’s Boston Globe article about the Awesome Foundation. I’ve sung their praises here before, of course. And I’m now through the first section of work in my course on Crafting Material Interfaces at the MIT Media Lab. (Here’s the first post about this class.) We’re documenting our work all [...]

radicalism and "miniaturized music"

“We do not return to individualized or privatized emotions when we use the Walkman: rather the Walkman’s artificiality makes us aware of the impending presence of the collective, which summons us with the infallibility of the sleepwalker. What the Walkman provides is the possibility of a barrier, a blockage between ‘me’ and the world, so [...]