Our Labs
Leonardo Labs are unique platforms for interdisciplinary creatives to incubate ideas where art, science, and technology meet. Under the auspices of CripTech Incubator, our labs focus this approach through the lens of creative access. Our labs are unique collaborative environments where disabled artists and technologists transform emergent technologies through the lens of disability innovation. Our specialized labs—the CripTech Metaverse Lab, CripTech AI Lab, and Touch Aesthetics Fellowship—function as creative research spaces where access becomes methodology. Each lab brings together creators with disabilities from a range of backgroundsto collectively "crip" technologies through hands-on experimentation, critical engagement, and participatory design. Through this distinctive format, participants not only creatively engage with existing systems but fundamentally reimagine technological possibilities—whether exploring haptic storytelling, developing AI artworks that celebrate bodily diversity, or creating new pathways for experiencing immersive media.
CripTech Metaverse Lab
The CripTech Metaverse Lab gathered a national cohort of disabled creatives in San Francisco to experience immersive media works. Co-produced by Leonardo/ISAST and Gray Area, this experiential research lab unfolded from January 27 to February 24, 2023 over a series of five remote and in-person convenings. This lab sought to generate collective, participatory access through convenings that invited ten artists working in different modalities —from sound design and dance to virtual reality—to encounter and collectively imagine or “crip” new creative pathways for experiencing metaverse artworks.
The lab draws this methodology from what Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch call crip technoscience: “politicized practices of non-compliant knowing-making: world-building and world-dismantling practice by and with disabled people and communities that respond to intersectional systems of power, privilege, and oppression by working within and around them.”
CripTech AI Lab
The CripTech AI Lab is a virtual creative incubator that utilizes community-driven digital and new media art projects to engage, critique and reimagine the relationship between disability and artificial intelligence. This virtual lab spans a 4-month period that includes creative, technical and conceptual workshops, guest speakers (scholars, artists, creative technologists), individual project development, and one-on-one project review and advising sessions with the lead artist, culminating in a virtual exhibition, presentation and panel review. Participants will explore themes such as: Algorithms of self-discovery and the creation of personal tools for personal discovery; data ownership; discovery through AI without being mediated through commercial platforms; using open source and indie “tools that don’t try to eat you”.
touch Aesthetics Fellowship
The Touch Aesthetics Fellowship is a partnership between the Haptics for Inclusion Lab, under the Narrative and Emerging Media Program at Arizona State University, and Leonardo CripTech Incubator. Based at the Haptics for Inclusion lab at the ASU California Center Broadway in Los Angeles, this 3-month fellowship is dedicated to the research and creative exploration of the intersections between haptics and disability. Harnessing innovative haptic technologies such as gloves, vests, and tactile actuators, fellows will employ the transformative power of touch to reimagine new possibilities for learning, creativity and accessibility in immersive storytelling.