Crip Kin, Manifesting

Abstract

How might those who have experienced medicalized technologies as forms of neglect, intervention, and surveillance begin to cultivate alternative relations to technology? Drawing on the work of three artists-Lisa Bufano, Sunaura Taylor, and Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi-I explore the possibility of framing technology as a site for crip kin-making. These artists are activating, interrogating, refusing, and repurposing medicalized aesthetics and technologies, finding within them inspiration and resources for their art practice. Rather than evaluating technologies on the basis of their ability to move bodies and minds into heightened productivity, efficiency, normalcy, and speed, they are creating objects and fostering relations that interrogate those very values. Building on scholars who recognize "kin" as encompassing more than the biological, reproductive, legal, and human, I discuss the possibilities of "crip kin," recognizing the queer possibilities of intimacy with other presences and entities.In Gloves for All, three rows of gloves hang across a gallery wall, and visitors are encouraged to try on the ones that most closely match their own hands.Although the gloves are all made of the same white fabric, they differ in size and shape. A few resemble socks, their curves unbroken by slots for fingers or thumbs. Consisting of eighteen pairs of zero-, two-, three-, four-, five-, and six-fingered gloves, the piece is part of the Project ImPerfect series by Kafer Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 2

Don’t Touch My MIDI Cables: Gender, Technology and Sound in Live Coding

“…This is a ‘profound politics of small things’, to quote Shannon Mattern (2018, p. 84), not least because technological materiality, spatial and technical architectures and temporalities all form the ‘conditions of possibility’ (Suchman, 2007) in which the live coder is positioned and must work. Live coding here is not an output or a performance, but needs to be thought about more in relation to, following Kafer (2019), interdependencies that are differently and variously felt: sonic (e.g., sounds, lack of sounds, glitches, tone, speed), linguistic (e.g., code, discourse, audience), visual (e.g., flashes, crashes, screenic) and embodied (the crowd, the architecture of the room). It is these networked interdependencies that co-create the conditions of possibility for the live coding experience as always-already human-machine: the experiences recounted here detail deep affective ties (Rodríguez, 2014, p. 49), and are far removed from the accounts of live coding discussed above as performance or creative output (for example).…”

“…It also means that we need to think of code, software and live coding as always in process, always being generated and produced, never fixed. 12 If we think of code, software and live coding in this way, we move away from understanding live coding as a single event or ‘performance’ and shift towards a notion more akin to Kafer’s (2019, p. 6) ‘networked interdependencies’, where temporal and spatial elements also need considering (live coding as a moment, a node within a wider network, or an assemblage within assemblages). Many of the live coders understood code, glitches and crashing in embodied ways: not so much as an issue with the code (over there), but more akin to an embodied moment of latency.…”

“…It is also a demand from scholarship, not least because cables, technologies, code and systems are not separate, fetishised or ‘owned’. They are entwined with and embedded within experiences and understandings of live coding—something more akin to ‘becoming with’ or ‘making kin’ (Kafer, 2019, p. 6). This in turn shifts focus from the potentialities of technology on or through the body to the generative capacities of mediation (for want of a better word), which are lived.…”

“…Live coding is an embodied, sensorial and live technological–human relationship that is recursively iterated through the sonic and visual in ways that direct us to what Alison Kafer (2019, p. 6) has termed (drawing on wider work on kinship, e.g., Haraway, 2008, 2016; Rodríguez, 2014; Benjamin, 2018; Murphy, 2018) ‘becoming with’ or ‘making kin’: a lived relationship that at the very least challenges ‘the idea of wholeness’ through a focus on ‘coalitions’ and ‘interdependencies’ (Kafer, 2019, pp. 5, 6).…”

When the Artificial Is Natural: Reconsidering What Bionics and Sensoria Do

“…Feminist studies scholar Alison Kafer encourages us to consider these embodied and diverse experiences and invites us to look at the “creative” (2019, 5) aspects of so‐called assistive technologies. She turns attention to the relationships that people develop with these technologies rather than simply examining their “ability to move bodies and minds into heightened productivity, efficiency, normalcy, and speed” (4).…”