"'Access remains \\ A puzzle \\ Revived from the dead \\ Original meaning' - An Artist Statement"
tentative artist statement thingy. intend to add links n stuff to it later. longer version than what i submitted for class. but yeah, it's that i had to write this for class. wanted to make it available if there happened to be other interested parties as well
In the chapter "Accessible" from Keywords for Radicals, Kelley Fritsch argues that "access" can, in different contexts, connote either "contact" (legibility) or "attack" (opacity). Using "inaccessible" academic writing as an example, Fritsch says that there may be times for radical groups to intentionally produce opacity so as to deny their legibility to power. The contestation of access in this was is a political gesture of resistance. At the same time, Fritsch is also saying that it is important for radical groups to continually renegotiate when it is right to mobilize this restriction of access (as an attack) -- i.e., operating in inaccessible ways so as to secure one's community against assaults from oppressive or otherwise antagonistic forces (p. 27-28) -- versus when to employ access as a mode of solidarity (as contact) -- i.e., engaging in what Fritsch quotes Mia Mingus as calling "access intimacy" where access is proactively offered so as to try to shore up the latent ableist gaps of legibility that swamp the myriad ways one can inhabit a crip (mind)body or mode of moving through the world (26).
Hopefully my video project can be a site for such negotiations (by which I mean in terms of form, content, and method). I have tried, for example, to provide a form of access through the use of open subtitling. Despite this, I will probably come up short of creating something truly molded in a practice of "access intimacy" as I nonetheless cling to certain forms of opacity, such as by creating a visually dense, perhaps overwhelming presentation.
I have left an intentional dissonance in the captions in the second part, where the captions at the bottom (and left) of the screen do not move in perfect sync with the audio, sometimes appearing much later or much earlier than the pace at which I am speaking. One intention behind this is as an attempt to work in mind of what Pooja Rangan writes about as "an aesthetic of redundancy" -- "the look, sound, duration, and feel of the film are rejoinders to the documentary axiom “show don’t tell.”" (p. 115). While Rangan uses this idea to talk about modes of production which combine and overlap both audio description and open captioning, I'm nonetheless trying to move in mind of what she's saying about how certain documentary traditions have privileged the image above all others and viewed text intervention as unwanted clutter (p. 116). Similarly, I found Rangan's mention of artists working in with "an aesthetic of displacement and substitution [so as] to emphasize the positive benefits of exclusion from ableist cultural spaces, widely referred in disability communities as JOMO (the joy of missing out)" (p. 114) to be an evocative idea to which I wanted to produce something which might raise awareness of how hearing audiences could be missing out on other modes of engagement with a text.
My efforts to deploy these aesthetics may be imperfect and my piece probably still ends up privileging hearing audiences slightly more than D/deaf and hard-of-hearing ones, but I'm trying at least to take a pass at creating something that's somewhat obtrusive and off-putting even to hearing people. I have overlapped two dyssynchronous temporal engagements with the text (spoken and captioned) in an attempt to emphasize that a spoken pace should not necessarily be the default. There may be limitations to this attempt to occlude hearing people's experiences rather than include D/deaf and hard-of-hearing people as this effect can still reproduce the ableist status quo of non-access. In mind of this, though, I've tried to have the captions at least offer some kind of access to what it being said, though, again, to be clear, I have not done suitable due diligence to confirm the usefulness of them for D/deaf and hard-of-hearing people (if they are, in fact, legible). I'm hoping, however, that distributing this video through a platform like YouTube which offers users the ability to modulate playback speeds might shore up potential deficiencies in this access gesture. That is, I'd like users to be able to engage with this video on whatever terms work for them, whether that be slowed down, with intermittent pausing, repeat watching, or whatever other interventions users might deem worth their time and effort. That being said, I recognize that off-loading the task of producing access onto the user is inherently a problematic gesture. For the time being, though, this will be a limit to my project's aims -- something to be iterated upon by others in the future.
The first two poems in the video are direct products of how academia has been inaccessible to me. As someone with a reading disability, reading course materials takes a lot of time and effort to complete. In Fall 2024, I took a Japanese modern literature course which understandably required a lot of reading every week. The format of the class where students were required to post at least three discussion posts about each reading for each of the week's two classes quickly became a large portion of what I spend my time on outside of class and resulted in an experience of continual exhaustion and delirium. These poems were written as an attempt to salvage my experiences in this class-- to try to rewrite my defaulted narrative of that the class was emblematic of a fourteen week process of pain and fatigue. To do this, I went through each of the course's assigned readings and stripped them for parts, composing a new poem out of randomly selected paragraphs and pages so as to produce something which could fit my n
My inclusion (and presentation) of these poems was informed by the discourses produced between Julie Minich's essay, "Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now", and the two subsequent response essays, "Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom?’" by Jina B. Kim and "Critical Disability Studies as Methodology" by Sami Schalk. In her piece, Minich asks, "If we are not giving careful thought to how attendance policies, seating arrangements, assignments, lighting, and mode of instruction make the knowledge generated in our classes accessible or inaccessible, can we claim to be “doing disability studies,” no matter how anti-normative the theory used in our research might be?" (p. 4). While I don't have necessarily have new thoughts to add to their discourses, I nonetheless find these discussions about the potential academic precarity of "doing disability studies" -- for both students and teachers -- to help me understand my own past experiences and start trying to think about how else things can be in the future. My poetic gesture is oriented to the past of my own experiences and while remediating these poems in this video is necessarily an act of synthesis which moves toward replying to this question, it's still the case that the past in this way anchors me. I think, though, that I need to address and move through this anchoring before I'm able to so readily gyrate about in service of meditating on what other ways of being and doing can look like.
I am trying in this video, to move in mind of how the three authors are talking about, what can a critical disability studies methodology or pedagogy or practice look like -- not just as a noun, but as a verb (Kim p. 1)? I'm trying to move in mind of the embedded call for people to move more consciously in mind of disability in academia (what I understand as related to what Jina Kim mentions as "slow professoring" (p.3)). I'm trying to say, this is a way I've found classes to be inaccessible, and this is a way that I've moved to try to overcome that on the personal level. I can’t know for sure if my enunciations will be helpful to anyone, but I think at least saying that this is an experience that exists whereby students (or at least I am) are having to take up personal interventions to make academia work for them and sustainable for the continued engagements with their (mind)bodies could be a useful or relevant gesture.
I mention Minich et al's pieces because they have genuinely helped me understand what shortcomings exist (in academia) and thus where access offerings and ways of conceptualizing access can still be improved, but I'm aware that their pieces also explore topics of the intersections disability and race -- of how race and disability are often co-constituted, of how racialized experiences of disability have, at times, been historically left out of critical disability discourses, of how racialized ability is also politically constructed, etc. -- and I sit with the fact that my piece, as I'm currently offering it, doesn't directly address topics of race. I think these two things are not mutually exclusive, though -- that I've not outwardly addressed race in my video even as my practice has been informed by these crip-of-color discourses and critiques. The trace is real, and I believe it is worth naming.
The music I'm using is an attempt to engage with Mills and Sterne's call for methods of dismediation -- "[a]gainst the contemporary backdrop of “universal communication,” [dismediation] allows for minor and separatist media" (p. 367) -- such as in that it comes from minor art spaces** that cross connect with disabled and sick experiences, topics, modes of production, and engagement with art. Devi McCallion's "CLUELESS", for example, was released on her Bandcamp page the day before she released her 2025 album, I'm It! as an errant single which, as the description puts it, offers some kind of transcription of the experience of getting a tattoo (which is, in turn related to injury) -- "I got a big tattoo at the same time Antarctica was under a solar eclipse. There is a song to go along with it." I have written elsewhere about how the album and its accompanying music videos may be understood as engaging in discourses and practices of dismediation, but, in short, it is that the album's content works through matrices of interdependency, talking, for example, about the difficulties of navigating the modern world while maneuvering in a sick (mind)body -- "I want you to solve my problems // You said // That you wont/cant do that shit my stomach hurts // F off // Am I evil? Blame that shit on mental illness" (4L Pussy). "holy night" also works through themes of sickness (at the end of the song) such as with the sampled audio that asks "to be sick unto death is the hopelessness that, even the last hope, death, is not available."
One of my intentions with this video is to attend to the physical infrastructure and architecture that mediates peoples' worlds. While attention to architectural access is not in and of itself an intervention and while my focusing my camera on images such as gates, walls, elevator, stairs, scaffolding, cobblestones, etc. is not a gesture of producing new images of access-- while individual elements are not unknown topics of discussion, I hope my gesture of relating these images together in space and time through an ambulatory long take can offer an embodied perspective into how access emerges from a system of relations between physical points in one's world. Additionally, I believe there is an important continuity between utility infrastructure (pipes, cables, valves, etc.) and mobility infrastructure (stairs, pathways, fences, etc.). Utility infrastructure mediates how we are able to navigate our homes and elsewhere -- how we are able to exist in them versus how we might need to move somewhere else to have our needs met. Mobility infrastructure mediates how we can move elsewhere but also how we can understand the boundaries of our homes etc. I say this is a gesture of dismediation in mind of Mills and Sterne's "call for more work on verbal, sonic, architectural, and tactile modes of communication" (367). This is my attempt to image and render a considered phenomenology of disconnection. ... It may not be the most robust consideration of these interstices and it undoubtedly has gaps, but it is my attempt to get movement started.
I open my video on an image of cobblestones because I had twisted my ankle on said cobblestones earlier that morning when I had walked over to the theater with my friend. And when I realized I forgot my ear defenders at his apartment, we had to walk twice more over the cobblestones and other such uneven pathing. I was visiting my friend over the weekend to see a screening of Twin Peaks: The Return and so my navigation of the city relied on his knowledge of the area. And when we at first went to the wrong screening location, we then also relied on the city's mobility infrastructure in order to make it to the correct theater.
Finally, the ways I'm moving my camera are informed by Reed Davenport’s I Didn't See You There and Alex Juhasz’s Please Hold in how these films illustrate the filmmaker moving through space. I used a handheld camera to highlight the shakiness embedded in my gait and I attempted to attend to perspectives not normally gazed at when people navigate these cities. Though I did not always succeed in this last part, one of the ways I tried to do so was to move close to my subjects and hold on them so as to hopefully invite a meditation on their existence as a daily commute wouldn't normally afford.
References
Juhasz, A. (2024) Please Hold.
Davenport, R., & Wilson, K. (2022). I didn't see you there. [Los Angeles, California]: Good Docs
Fritsch, K. (2016). Accessible. Keywords for radicals: the contested vocabulary of late capitalist struggle. Chico, CA, USA: AK Press
Rituals. (2025). I’m It! [Album]. https://blacksquares.bandcamp.com/album/im-it
Girls Rituals. (2025). CLUELESS [Song]. https://blacksquares.bandcamp.com/track/clueless
Kim, J. B. (2017). Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s “Enabling Whom?” Lateral (Island Lake), 6(1). https://doi.org/10.25158/L6.1.14
Mills, M., & Sterne, J. (2017). Afterword II: Dismediation—Three Proposals, Six Tactics. In E. Ellcessor & B. Kirkpatrick (Eds.), Disability Media Studies (pp. 365–378). NYU Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pwt9hg.20
Minich, J. A. (2016). Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now. Lateral (Island Lake), 5(1). https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.9
Rangan, P. (2025). The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability. Investigating Visible Evidence: New Challenges for Documentary Series. New York: Columbia University Press
Schalk, S. (2017). Critical Disability Studies as Methodology. Lateral (Island Lake), 6(1). https://doi.org/10.25158/L6.1.13
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