Date: 29 June 2023

Time: 9:00 AM Pacific Time 

Immersive media vibrates embodiment. It allows the viewer to dissolve into dimensional narratives, making experiences and bodies pliable.  The introduction of VR, AR and interactive exhibitions into practice has given nonfiction media makers new tools to tell expanded narratives. These same tools with their capacity to innovate in turn strengthen the need for accessible storytelling. While immersive can be, well, immersive, considerations around an ethics of representation and access are at the heart of this panel.  

The disabled community in particular calls for a radical restructuring of pre existing frameworks, from inclusive asset libraries to cripped (accessible) workflows and haptics. In this panel presented by the Nonfiction Access Initiative, the present conditions of immersive media will be outlined centering disabled experience as a creative force central for mapping and expanding the field. Contending with the virtual and practical infrastructure that brings it into our lives, leaders in the field of immersive accessibility come together to build a critical scaffolding around the modality of accessible immersive storytelling and expand on the knowledge that the disabled life brings. 

The panel is part of the Nonfiction Access Initiative (NAI) to invite disabled immersive makers to fill out the Nonfiction Media Makers with Disabilities Survey. Panelists include Joanna Wright from Access and Disability Justice Working Group at Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab, Vanessa Chang from Leonardo/ISAST, Sultan Sharrief from The Quasar Lab, and disabled immersive artists; Nat Decker and M Eifler. Moderated by Nonfiction Access Initiative (NAI) Funds Program and Access Coordinator Cielo Saucedo. ASL and CART Captioning will be provided.

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Speakers: 

Joanna Wright, Research Fellow & Documentarian, MIT Open Documentary Lab & Co-Creation Studio

Joanna Wright is a Welsh multidisciplinary artist and researcher. Her projects are often long-term collaborations with communities, archive collections, and scientists that re-examine established narratives and relationships between people, place, environment, and time. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the Institute for Contemporary Art London, i-Docs, The British Film Institute, British Council, Channel 4 UK, BBC, IDFA, True/ False, Ars Electronica, and the United Nations. Joanna is honorary senior research fellow at Bangor University, Wales, supported at Open Documentary Lab by the British Council, British Film Institute Horizons, and Ffilm Cymru Wales.

M Eifler, Executive and Creative Director of BlinkPopShift

M is a artist and the Founder of BlinkPopShift, a disability futures lab proving disability is a hotbed of innovation. They are best known for their computational prosthetics like Prosthetic Memory, Masking Machine, and Invisible Sculpture. M is a 2023 Disability Futures Fellow and their work has been showcased internationally.  (Plus they make excellent cookies... good to know in case of snack emergencies.)

Nat Decker, Artist

Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago born Los Angeles based artist interpreting the intimacies of queer and disabled lived experience as provocation toward collective care and liberation. Operatively creating between digital and material mediums, they identify the computer as an assistive tool affording a more accessible practice. Often from bed, they use digital 3D software to trace serpentine connections between the body and technology, reimagining fantastical mobility devices as cultural celebration and agitation of conventional desirability politics. This cyclically informs their work with sculpture, creating non-functional mobility devices as aesthetic scrutiny and frictional commentary on designations of usefulness. Nat is also an access worker, consulting on accessibility for organizations such as p5.js, New Art City, Creative Growth, the LA Spoonie Collective, and for various projects at the University of California, Los Angeles. In June 2022 they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design/Media Arts and Disability Studies.

Sultan Sharreif, Chief Investigator, The Quasar Lab

Transmedia Artist turned Media Scientist with a specialization in social impact and design. He holds a BA in Film from University of Michigan, an MS in Comparative Media from MIT, and is a PhD candidate in Media Arts & Practice at USC. His directorial debut feature film, Bilal's Stand, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and he has since produced two additional feature films, two documentaries, and a TV program. In 2018 he founded the Quasar Lab at MIT, an institutional-hacking research lab that uses disruptive community organizing as a strategy for futurist design. Sharrief is currently an XRts Fellow at ASU Herberger Institute, is the Event Designer for the MIT XR hackathon and is now leading the program design for the new Haptics Lab at the ASU New & Emerging Media program in the ASU California Center.

Vanessa Chang, Director of Programs, Leonardo/ISAST

As a curator, writer and educator, Vanessa Chang builds communities and conversations about art, technology and human bodies. She is Director of Programs at Leonardo/ISAST. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, where she was a Geballe Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and also ran the Graphic Narrative Workshop. She was lead investigator for The Grid: Art + Tech Report (2020) and taught in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. Most recently, she curated Recoding CripTech at SOMArts Cultural Center, Intersections at the Leonardo Convening at Fort Mason Center for the Arts, and Artobots. She has appeared on NPR’s On the Media and State of the Art, and her curatorial work has been profiled in such venues as Art in America and KQED Arts. Her writing has been published in Wired, Slate, Noema, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Visual Culture, and Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, among other venues.

Cielo Saucedo, Artist and NAI Funds and Access Coordinator

Cielo Saucedo is an disabled artist from a family of migrant farm workers. They work with computer generated imagery, non-fiction writing and sculpture to disrupt notions of humanism and make space for disabled mind-bodies and ecologies. Technology mediates their artistic production with the wax and wane of their ability. From this direct response to their body, an unprivileged mutuality between ecological space and virtual experience is offered. In their work video games trace histories of oil infrastructure and birch trees are woven into sand dunes. They have shown work in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, London and Quito. They participated in the artist collective SIQ (Sick in Quarters) and are a founding member of W.E., an ecological action group started in Chicago. They received their BFA from School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and are a MFA candidate at UCLA.