Slow Story-Making in Urgent Times

Abstract

In the context of an alarmingly sped up “slow death” for disabled people living under emergency COVID-19 medical triage protocols in Ontario, Canada, that produce, naturalize, and weaponize our vulnerability, we assert that slow digital story-making opens a threshold space filled with complex, relational, lively collaborative worldmaking. Here, we analyze videos made by three digital/multimedia story-makers, known as experimenters, who express the turbulence they lived through via storywork that described their unique yet entwined vantage points. Following Rosi Braidotti’s caution against capitalizing on tragedy, we offer Donna Haraway’s “compost writing” as an alternative to building theory. By compos(t)ing online multimedia stories that straddle digital/human/more-than-human realms, we take up “digital composting” as an unfinished methodology wherein we move collectively, even from the isolation of our own homes. We posit slow digital story-making as a way of “staying with the trouble” as we find ourselves worldmaking at the complex threshold between life/death, vulnerability/resistance, individual/relational, human/nonhuman. To compost digital multimedia stories is to leave them to ruminate in the complex entanglements of posthuman existences in urgent times.

Misfits Meet Art and Technology: Cripping Transmethodologies

“…Our approach to the ways disabled people intra-act with technology shifts away from ableist and instrumentalist ends—meaning technological development or use that upholds or remains aligned with colonial capitalism’s metrics of profitability, productivity, and perfectibility ( Ahmed, 2019 )—and toward artful and political engagements that create disability culture and justice ( Rice et al, 2022 ). Bringing into play various artists’ works as exemplars, we claim that when crip makers repurpose existing technology and invent new technologies in artistic processes designed to enact care and access, extend embodiment, and create welcoming spaces, they challenge understandings of technology’s proper purpose and use.…”

Performing Fat Liberation: Pretty Porky and Pissed Off’s Affective Politics and Archive

“…World-making, they assert, does not refer to "one world"; rather, "different way[s] of worldmaking provoke different, interlocking worlds" (Klein and Noeth 2011, p. 8). In this account, performers and audiences come together to make and re-make worlds over the span of a performance, joining in co-creating micro-worlds in which the participants and audiences want to live (Rice et al 2022a). As Hernandez (2020) writes in her performance autoethnography of a fat women of color burlesque troupe, "the cowitnessing of fat flesh onstage makes it possible to be hopeful about a fat future in which [audiences] too can engage in a fat-liberating present/future" (109).…”

Storying the Repertoire: Performing a Slow and Queer Backwardness at the Upstairs Lounge

“…Slowness, as story-making method, can be a radical and self-determining practice that resists the violence of the urgent. Slow story-making, “creates space for telling into the urgency of the moment while also slowing down the process so we [can] make space for the felt contradictions and unfinished configurations to surface” (Rice et al, 2022, p. 247). The slowness of story-making and story-telling that I write about here is certainly invitational, but that doesn’t mean it has to be for everybody.…”