What is Recording CripTech?

Recording CripTech documents artist practices from Leonardo CripTech Incubator (2021-2023) and its final exhibition, E.A.A.T. or Experiments in Art, Access and Technology. These artists are: Meesh Sara Fradkin, Carmen Papalia, Josephine Sales, Andy Slater, and Olivia Ting.

With this archive, Ground Works hopes to both support these artists’ ongoing work, as well as make resources available to those who want to explore these processes at the convergence of art, research, technology, creativity, and collaboration, as well as the unique intersectional identities of the artists represented by this work. The artists themselves are co-creators of this archive, and we strive to make it accessible; it is open-access and takes into account the differing abilities of potential users.

Context: The Leonardo CripTech Incubator

Reco(r)ding CripTech is a project to document the creative, interdisciplinary processes of the artists who were in residence with the Leonardo/ISAST CripTech Incubator from 2021-2023. The CripTech Incubator supported artists with disabilities in engaging with and remaking creative technologies through the lens of accessibility. The CripTech Incubator’s origins and goals are explained in the following video of curators Vanessa Chang and Lindsey Dolich Felt:

Video: CripTech Incubator Introductory Video

The CripTech Incubator artists were in residence at various sites in California in 2022, working toward a group show to be held in the second half of 2023. The residencies of the four artists who are represented in this archive were spread across sites and time as follows:

• Meesh Sara Fradkin: in-person residency at the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science, and Technology (SBCAST), July-August 2022
• Josephine Sales: hybrid residency at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at UC Irvine, January 2022-2023
• Andy Slater: virtual residency at Thoughtworks Arts, March-June 2022
• Olivia Ting: virtual residency at Thoughtworks Arts, March-June 2022

The E.A.A.T. (Experiments in Art, Access, and Technology) exhibit at the Beall Center on the campus of the University of California, Irvine, from September, 2023 to January, 2024, was the culmination of the CripTech Incubator fellowship. E.A.A.T. is well-documented on Leonardo’s excellent virtual exhibition website. Reco(r)ding CripTech uses, with permission, some artifacts that appear on this webpage, but the purpose of the archive is different; we seek to document the artists’ process along the way to those products that appeared in E.A.A.T.

Context: Making this Archive

As the incubator began, Ground Works partnered with Leonardo/ISAST to document the artist’s work and processes during this time.

The initial cohort of six artists was selected in summer 2021 and began to meet virtually, once a month, as a cohort that fall. The Ground Works team originally envisioned an archive that responded explicitly to the journal’s mission—to both elevate arts-integrated research and to reflect on how such work gets done. We imagined an ethnographic process of interview and observation to better understand the CripTech Incubator artists’ creative, collaborative processes.

Instead, we switched to an artist-led approach; the artists would decide what went into the archive and how it got made. Reco(r)ding CripTech staff attended some of the artists’ monthly meetings, gathering information about how an archive might serve them, what was important to them about documentation, and whether they wanted to participate at all.

These conversations continued in an ongoing listening process with the CripTech Incubator artists. Conversations were guided by cross-disability facilitation, exploring how to meet the individual artists’ access needs and how they would like their work to be represented. Importantly, the artists have full control and agency over how their work is documented, and who can access that documentation. Throughout, we have worked closely with the artists to center their practices, process, and preferred methods of documentation. As such, this archive reflects each artists perspectives, values, and choices around process. Each artist’s process archive is unique. The archive as a whole includes video- or audio-interviews, images, notes, creative iterations, and more. For more information about our process of making the archive, please refer to our whitepaper (August 2026).

Reco(r)ding CripTech understands the artist’s work in the CripTech Incubator as a distinctive research ecology: one in which knowledge is produced by the often marginalized and under-represented disability community, through arts-based, collaborative, and interdisciplinary means. By framing the artists’ processes as arts-integrative research, this documentation will foreground disabled artists as producers of knowledge, and interdisciplinary works of art as expressions of knowledge. This intervention has implications for both the research enterprise and the disability community by upending the assumption of the scholarly article as the definitive site of knowledge production. Reco(r)ding CripTech centers disabled artists as knowers, witnessing and sharing their creative processes as means to understand this knowledge better.

About “crip”

Note that within disability culture, the term “crip” recognizes disability as a valued cultural and political identity. But “crip” can also identify an active practice through which disabled makers and artists transform environments, institutions, and technologies to make them more accessible. Here, we turn to CripTech Incubator leads Vanessa Chang and Lindsey D. Felt for the beginnings of an explanation of “crip,” quoting extensively from their commentary “Cripping Media Art Technologies” on Ground Works. First, they explain the concept’s connection to disability justice:

In recent years, disability justice has emerged as a paradigm and practice incubated by queer and disabled creative practitioners of color like Patty Berne and Sins Invalid. A [Disability Justice framework](https://sinsinvalid.org/10-principles-of-disability-justice/) understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met” (Sins Invalid, 2015). Lifting up the principles of disability justice, including cross-disability solidarity, Leonardo CripTech Incubator is rooted in collective access, valuing the exploration and creation of “new ways of doing things that go beyond able-bodied/minded normativity” (Berne, 2015). Centering disability innovation, this approach aims to shift the fields of media art and technology.

Chang and Felt go on to trace the origins of “criptech”:

We are guided by Hamraie and Fritsch’s [Crip Technoscience Manifesto](https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29607), which calls for a “non-compliant knowing making;” a practice by which disabled people and communities dismantle existing technologies, infrastructures, and materials (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019). This charge builds on the provocation of “crip,” a position that disability is a desirable part of the world. CripTechnoscience, or CripTech for short, takes root in crip theory, a field of research invested in re-centering the skills and knowledge disabled people cultivate to remake inaccessible worlds (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2015; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006). By cripping art and technology praxis, CripTech Incubator seeks to expand the creative horizon of accessibility.

Partners

a2ru and Ground Works have partnered with Leonardo/ISAST to develop Reco(r)ding CripTech. Leonardo is a publication and think tank that serves transdisciplinary scholars, artists, scientists, technologists and thinkers. The Leonardo CripTech Incubator is an art-and-technology fellowship for artists with disabilities to engage and remake creative technologies through the lens of accessibility. The Ground Works staff, Leonardo staff, and CripTech Incubator artists, as well as a vibrant network of advisors and collaborators have all worked together to realize this project.

A full list of contributors can be found on the Credits page

Funding and Support

Invaluable support for Rec(o)rding CripTech comes from a2ru, Carnegie Mellon University, and Leonardo.

In addition, Recording CripTech was awarded an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant in 2022, a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant in 2023, and an ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant in 2025.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Grant Program is designed to promote and provide resources for digital humanities projects that aim to diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, and contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues, especially those that elevate the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities including Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; people with disabilities; and queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov