Talk/Screening 1: Access and Abundance

A live, online talk and screening exploring captioning abundance and access with scholar, artist and activist, Louise Hickman and Disability Studies scholar, Tanya Titchkosky.

Series logo: the words Caption-Conscious Ecology spread across 3 sides of a square, inside square brackets

Event Info:

Online. Free. Live Stream.
You can access this event through this webpage and on the Nottingham Contemporary YouTube channel.
There will be live captioning for this event.
A transcript will be available for download on this webpage afterwards.
A captioned video will be available via the Nottingham Contemporary YouTube channel and Voices in the Gallery website after the event.
There will be British Sign Language interpretation for this event.
The duration of the event is 2 hours. A rest break is included.

Louise Hickman: More abundance, less austerity

How can we reimagine the creative potential of captions? In Louise’s talk on “More Abundance, Less Austerity”, she adopts a performative approach to surface the shifting tensions between the abundances and the demands of cultivating accessible spaces. This talk includes a screening of “Captioning on Captioning.” A short film produced by Louise and Shannon Finnegan (New York, US) in collaboration with real-time writer Jennifer. As part of this screening, Louise will provide audio description of the film. The film itself takes place over a series of four meetings in late 2020. The group worked to externalise the process and practice of real-time writing for Deaf and hard of hearing readers. Louise and Shannon edited the film to show moments of care, vulnerability, and intimacy, which grants technical insight into the stenographer’s software, including dictionary building, transcription errors, and speech-to-text latency. While editing the film, we questioned the impulse to edit out phonetic mishaps or tidy up the dialogue between the collaborators as a testament to the growing demands of real-time work. Those demands replicate the ideal of the automation of text (i.e., mechanical labour) that is shaped by a complete and objective view of translation work. That is, the implicit assumption that captioning is moving audible information from one medium to another.

Louise Hickman is an activist and scholar of communication and uses ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to consider how access is produced for disabled and deaf people. Her current project focuses particularly on access produced by real-time stenographers and transcriptive technologies in educational settings. She uses an interdisciplinary lens drawing on feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work, and the ways access is co-produced through human (and primarily female) labour, technological systems, and economic models and conditions. Louise is a Research Associate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy hosted at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge. Louise is also a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently working on her first manuscript: “Crip AI/The Automation of Access.”

Tanya Titchkosky: Encountering Access as Perception

James Baldwin (1962) says that “all societies have battled with the incorrigible disturber of the peace – the artist.”  But sometimes it seems that artists, image creators, disturb little when they fit exceptionally well within expected or normal forms of sensuality – of hearing, seeing, feeling, and of thinking.  And yet, who knows better than image creators that everything heard, seen, felt or thought is made through human relations?  To gain access to this sensual fit, and to gain access to these modes of perception and how we use them may be a fertile field of creation that opens many possibilities for image creation and its captioning.  This sort of access does not follow a set of rules, nor is it something that we add to a creation as though it were a simple after-thought. Instead, access is a language that puts us into a living relation with how we sense each other and our communities, making contours and edges of belonging. The question now becomes -- How do we make access, like the artist and imagine maker, an incorrigible disturber of sensual peace. I am going to talk about how such questions of access are already part of our lives and can provoke creative practice. Citation to Baldwin, James. 1962. The Creative Process. https://agitatejournal.org/the-creative-process/

Dr. Tanya Titchkosky is Professor in Social Justice Education at OISE at the University of Toronto, teaching and writing in the area of disability studies for more than 20 years. Some of her books include Disability, Self, and Society (2003), as well as, Reading and Writing Disability Differently (2007) and The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning (2011). Tanya works from the position that whatever else disability is, it is tied up with the human imagination steeped in mostly unexamined conceptions of “normalcy.” This disability studies research and teaching orientation, relies on other critical approaches to inquiry that question the grounds of Western ways of knowing, such as phenomenology influenced by Black, Queer, and Indigenous Studies. By grappling with the act of interpretation, Tanya hopes to reveal the restricted imaginaries that surround our lives in and with disability. With co-editors, she has a new reader coming out in 2022 titled DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies.