Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Disability Arts on Wikipedia

I added some new text to the 'Disability Arts' page on Wikipedia, link below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability_Art

Find below the sections I added that are highlighted in orange.

I really wanted to fill out the resources for researchers here, such as history of 'disability art' in the USA, names of leading scholars, relevant or useful websites, and the contestation around the concept itself as it continues to evolve. My contribution is just a beginning, and while I'm pleased with it, we'll see what Wikipedia says about it. It fills out another Wikipedia page, 'Disability in the Arts' quite nicely I think.

I ran into great technical difficulty with making my citations (and consequently all other citations) appear on the page, so I'll need extra help with this.

Thanks,
Amanda



Disability Art

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Disability Art or Disability Arts is any art, theatre, fine arts, film, writing, music that takes disability as its theme or whose context could be considered to relate to disability.[1]


Meaning

Disability Arts is an area of art where the context of the art takes on disability as its theme. Disability Art is about exploring the conceptual ideas and physical realities of what is to be disabled or concepts relating to the word.

[edit]Context

Disability Arts is different from the Disability in the arts which refers more to the active participation or representation of disabled people in the arts rather than the context of the work being about disability. Disability Arts does not require the maker of the art to be disabled (see Disability Arts in the Disability Arts Movement for the exception) nor does art made by a disabled person automatically become disability art just because it was a disabled person that made it.
An example of Disability Art by a non-disabled person: Alison Lapper Pregnant, 2005, Marc Quinn[2] would be considered Disability Arts[3] because of its context as he reveals the concept of the work was to make "the ultimate statement about disability"[4]
An example of Disability Art by a disabled person: effective, defective, creative, 2000, Yinka Shonibare, shows photos of foetuses from women deemed to be at risk of delivering a defective baby,[5] therefore looking at the relationship of defectiveness and disability.
An example of art made by a disabled person that is not Disability Art: Dorothea, 1995, Chuck Close; relates to his "strict adherence to the self-imposed rules that have guided his art" and "formal analysis and methodological reconfiguration of the human face" [6] therefore conceptually has nothing to do with disability therefore is not Disability Arts.
As the examples show it is the concept of the artwork that is important not who made it.

[edit]Canon of Disability Art

[edit]Context of Disability Arts in the Disability Arts Movement

Disability Arts is a concept which was developed out of the Disability Arts Movement.[7] In the disability arts movement Disability Arts stood for 'art made by disabled people which reflects the experience of disability.'[8] To be making Disability Arts in the Disability Arts Movement it is conditional on being a disabled person.

[edit]Development of the Concept of Disability Arts in Britain

The development of disability arts began in the 1970s / 80s as a result of the new political activism of the disabled peoples' movement.[7] The exact date the term came into use is currently unverified, although the first use of the term in the Disability Arts Chronology is 1986[9] (please note it is not contextualised in this reference). During this period the term Disability Arts in the Disability Arts Movement has been retrospectively agreed to mean 'art made by disabled people which reflects the experience of disability'[10]
As the movement and term developed, the Disability Arts Movement began to expand from what mainly started out as disabled people's cabaret to all art forms. Disability Arts Movement began to grow year on year and was at its height during the late 1990s.[9] Key exhibitions which looked at Disability Arts happened like Barriers, which was an exhibition considering physical, sensory and intellectual limitation and its effect on personal art practice. (8 Feb - 16 Mar 2007: Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth)[9] and the creation of the Disability Film Festival in London in 1999,[11] – both of which looked at work by disabled people as well as Disability Arts.
Disabled people's politics in Britain was changed by the Disability Discrimination Act, which was first brought in 1995.[12] In the subsequent years as people adapted to the protection of legislation a new wave of politics entered in the Disability Arts Movement. In 2004 the revised Disability Discrimination Act, signified the end of the domination of art based on discrimination politics in the Disability Arts Movement. A new generation of disabled people where less political[7] and carried an agenda of integration. This combined with the Carers Movement highlighted a change in attitude that acknowledged the work of the Disability Arts Movement to claim the term Disability Arts but showed a movement away from the idea that only disabled people could make Disability Arts. It began to be recognised that disability art needs to be "supported by society itself and not just by disabled people".[13]
In 2007 London Disability Arts Forum held a debate at Tate Modern on the motion 'Should disability and Deaf art be dead and buried in the 21st Century?' produced in response to arts cuts from the Arts Council faced by disabled-led arts organisations at the time. This debate has become significant in the way Melvin Bragg's article highlighted how Disability Arts like Marc Quinn's sculpture Alison Lapper Pregnant raise the profile of disability in the arts.[3] This debate and subsequent article set in motion a change for many people to recognise that the new generation of disabled people and artists did not feel it necessary to control the term disability arts but to open it out for a wider view on disability .
Very few people are aware of disability as a topic of art,[14] mainly due to the lack of accessible and cohesive academic work and publications around the subjects of Disability Arts and the Disability Arts Movement. It has yet to enter into art curriculum or establish itself as a strongly recognised concept in the arts – so development of the subject needs much more work for it to justify its place as a relevant term long term in the arts. On the other hand, in some instances, artists, curators or theorists who identify as disabled and make, curate or write about disability in their creative practices feel ambivalent about this category.
In some circles Disability Arts is still promoted as "art made by disabled people that reflects the experience of disability." This is most notably the line taken by NDACA Co-op,[15] who is predominantly made up of members who were key to the development of the Disability Arts Movement. Although it is more commonly accepted that non-disabled people can make valid disability arts, even by people that strongly align themselves with the Disability Arts Movement.[16]

Development of the Concept of Disability Arts in USA

VSA, (previously Very Special Arts), the international organization on arts and disability in the USA, was founded more than 35 years ago by Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith to provide arts and education opportunities for people with disabilities and increase access to the arts for all. With 52 international affiliates and a network of nationwide affiliates, VSA is providing arts and education programming for youth and adults with disabilities around the world.[17]
The development of disability arts in the USA is also tied to several non-profit organizations such as Creative Growth in Oakland, CA that serves adult artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation and a social atmosphere among peers. [18]Organizations with similar mandates in the Bay Area include Creativity Explored in San Francisco, and NIAD Art Center in Richmond (National Institute of Art & Disabilities).
Currently, the leading scholars in disability arts in the USA include Michael Davidson, Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Ann Fox, Joseph Grigely, Georgina Kleege, Petra Kuppers, Simi Linton, Ann Millett-Gallant, David. T Mitchell, Carrie Sandahl, Susan Schweik, Tobin Siebers and Sharon L. Snyder, who write about a range of topics within disability arts, such as performance, literature, aesthetics, visual art, music, art history, theatre, dance and more.
Bodies of Work: Network of Disability Arts & Culture (including artists and organizations) is one of the leading disability arts festivals occurring in Chicago every few years, whose art illuminates the disability experience. From the local to the international, “bodies of work” explores innovative forms of artistic expression, derived from unique bodies and minds, that explore the disability experience, advance the rights of disabled people, and widen society's under-standing of what it means to be human.[19]
Artists who identify as disabled and make work about disability are growing in numbers, as are curators who identify as disabled and curate exhibitions on disability. Katherine Ott is a Curator at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institute who has curated a number of exhibits on the history of the body, disability, ethnic and folk medicine, integrative and alternative medicine, ophthalmology, plastic surgery and dermatology, medical technology, prosthetics and rehabilitation, sexuality, visual and material culture and other ephemera. [20]

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Visibilility of Embodied Female Prosthesis (with a side of Piping, White Hot Turmoil)

For our wikistorming project, we decided to collaborate on multiple levels for this assignment: in username and in process. We created the Wikipedia account name "femsociality" to signify the collaborative nature of our work. Our first task was to expand on the alternative texts already established in the existing Wikipedia entry on prosthesis. In doing so, we discovered exclusionary discourses that were deeply entrenched within the reasoning and logic built into Wikipedia's infrastructure; the very act of making something "accessible" to the Wikipedia viewer (such as making sure there are "logical" caption descriptions that coincide with the images they describe) sets the parameters of what would be deemed to be made accessible. For example, according to one section of the "Wikipedia: Alternative text for images" Wikipedia entry, the claim is made that an "image that is purely decorative (provides no information and serves only an aesthetic purpose) requires no alternative text." This illustrates a troubling assumption and defines the limits of how visual material should be interpreted on Wikipedia entries.

Our second moment of "failure" occurred when we tried to insert alternative captions on the back-end of Wikipedia but had no means to test whether our codes were functional or written correctly. We had no means to test whether our alternative texts were readable via screen reader technology. This automatically curtails who may feel inclined to edit, as one cannot see or test their final product.

During the process of writing alternative text for a particular image of a prosthetic knee device on the "Wikipedia: Prosthesis" entry, we found ourselves using a specific style of language to describe the object represented in the photograph. We automatically seemed to engage in mechanical, abstracted forms of thick description rather than playing or experimenting with alternative modes of visual description.

As an unexpected offshoot of our initial inquiry into alternative texts, we noticed an overwhelming presence of images on the Prosthesis entry depicting men's relationships with prosthetic devices that were heavily invested in militarized frameworks. In response to this abundance of male bodies, we grit our teeth as we committed the same violence perpetuated in both neoliberal conquests and scholarly explications of otherness as we quickly mined the informational fields of Flickr Creative Commons for entries of "woman with prosthesis" and found an overabundance of World Bank photography of women in the Global South wearing prosthetic devices. We wrestled with inner conflict as we attempted to "objectively" and "thickly" describe the photo of a woman from Cambodia (a woman whose name we may never come to know; one who is positioned as nameless, voiceless, and disposable) using a prosthetic leg, as per the alternative text model of visual description. After hours and hours of arguing, of feeling deeply conflicted, of both critically analyzing and pitilessly bitching, we decided to make our experience of this Wikistorming project partially visible on this blog and partially imprinted on the Wikipedia: Prosthesis page. #dropsmic #neoliberalism #postcolonialviolence #academicprivilege #ivorytowerstatus #PhDturmoil

Louise      >:(
Christina   >:(
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Friday, April 26, 2013

Deepening analysis of Wikipedia's gender bias (comment)

*I wrote this comment, and my update for our blog about it, last Wednesday but I didn't get a chance to share until now. In the meantime, my comment *has* generated thoughtful responses from the author and others, which is really thrilling! These responses encourage me to think about how scholarly commenting can be a fruitful practice in online spaces (which, as I've said before, I've been hesitant to engage in). -MSJ
*April 24, 2013 -- My comment invites A. Wadewitz, an academic, Wikipedia editor, and blogger, into a conversation about her April 9, 2013 Hastac blog entry addressing the gender gap on Wikipedia (“Wikipedia is pushing the boundaries of scholarly practice but the gender gap must be addressed”). 


The aim of my comment is to share my theoretical hesitations regarding her call for women and people of color to work for free as editors. I frame my critique by asking how one might deepen analysis she starts on the principles of Wikipedia (objectivity and neutrality) and extend to the ethos of volunteerism that underwrites the free labor of Wikipedia. It is my hope that relating my questions to an analytical lens she uses will serve as an invitation to a conversation rather than an attack on the value of her call or analysis.
The comment is around 300 words -- still a little lengthy -- but I think it works as an academic response. I found, unsurprisingly, that it is challenging to convey theoretical questions that have been percolating in my mind for some time into a conversational comment. But it’s also great to think that I’ve (*hopefully*) started a conversation with someone with whom I respect. I’m looking forward to further conversation.

--
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Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Questioning binaries

Hello all,
I am still attempting to gain access to post my comment on the actual blog. There are several comments on it already, so I suspect they might have closed comments at some point, perhaps due to the age of the post.

http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010/08/23/huey-newton-complexes/

Thank you for your thoughts on this and for the various shared personal experience expressed throughout the comments. I will admit to also being fed up with the overdone Tragic Mulatto trope. However, what's disconcerting to me about the similar sentiment expressed here is the inherent assumptions of what it means to be dark-skinned and light-skinned. I find the tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of light-skinned women who are willing to "claim their blackness" alarming. What underscores that statement is a flippant dismissal of the fact that this particular color binary is created by those outside of it.

The act of classification itself is the tool for persecution. Focusing on the differences within a marginalized group and a continued insistence on the hierarchical stereotypes [particularly when they're destructive tropes created to classify and divide "people of color"] merely serves to instantiate the violence perpetrated by the hegemony. Though I can understand a need to acknowledge complex subjectivities within those amassed under the heading of "people of color," overemphasis on partial privilege eclipses shared marginalization I question the idea that casting those particularities in a negative light can somehow help to improve the lot of the whole.

Facilitating a nuanced discourse of blackness must certainly include an honest discussion of the stratifying privileges experienced by black women with lighter skin and the stereotypes saddling dark-skinned women. [To be clear, I agree that all the privileges listed on your checklist are realities.] Yet, that discourse should unite rather than divide. However differently it may be experienced under certain circumstances, the unbearable weight of white patriarchy is felt by all women [and people] of color.   Arguing over whether or not it is to the same degree in every arena distracts from resisting the monolithic and oppressive categories of "blackness."

The thing that every person of color has in common, and I would argue the most important thing to keep in mind if we ever hope to gain ground in fighting this mindset, is that we are all Other. Whatever superficial affordances a light-skinned person might experience, it is ultimately only that — superficial.     

* Tara-Lynne Pixley
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Algorithmic Theater

Hi all,

This is a comment (a long long comment, I am sorry) that I wrote in response to Annie Dorsen's Algorithmic Theater manifesto a few months ago, both Dorsen's original manifesto and my response were published on the Theater Journal blog (http://theatermagazine.org/algorithmic-theater). I am sharing it with you mostly because it is relevant to discussions we are having in class about boundaries, human-ness and the post-human, and also references Primate Cinema (which was presented as part of Audacious Speculations).

Still, because I posted this before encountering much of the scholarship I have read in the past few months, there is a lot I would write differently today. Specifically, I would be more explicit about actual models of post-human put forward by specific theories, particularly Haraway and Barad. Though my larger point is still true to what I believe (that posthuman art making must think with, not against, entities other than human beings, allowing them to affect and change the work) I think I shortchanged the actual scholarship and lost a chance to apply important theoretical models. Anyway, here it is. See you all soon!

Yelena

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Metalogue: Why an Algorithm [i]

The summer 2012 issue of Theater magazine published Annie Dorsen’s manifesto on Algorithmic Theater, in which she describes her performance Hello Hi There and discusses what it might mean in the context of theater history. Dorsen’s intriguing performance (of which I saw an online excerpt, but hope to see “live” and in its entirety at PS122 in January) consists largely of two laptops on stage, improvising a dialogue via chatbots.  The chatbots’ chatter is generated by a program designed  to  mimic human speech,  a program which is by  definition  based  in  algorithms,  and therefore, Dorsen claims, when we watch the performance, what we are watching is the play of algorithms. Everything else we see there—narrative, consciousness, meaning—is brought to being by our own desires and habits of seeing.

In Dorsen’s analysis of her own work, she describes three major traditions that are challenged by Hello Hi There: embodiment as a prerequisite for theater, performance time being limited by the experience of spectatorship, and language as window to consciousness.

An algorithm is, in the simplest sense, a set of instructions; if you could remove the assumption of an original programmer, you could also say that an algorithm is a set of sequential rules.  Presumably, it would not be correct to say, as Dorsen does, that the algorithms are observable in a disembodied form in Hello Hi There because they are in fact embodied in at least two ways: first, in the body of the computer that processes these instructions, and second, in the body of language that constitutes the output of the instructions. The algorithms are dramatized by these double bodies, since Hello Hi There puts both the laptops and the language they produce on stage for viewership.  I think Dorsen’s point is more that the only bodies onstage  are non-human  bodies,  and it  is precisely  the lack  of human bodies  that challenges  the notion that theater requires  an exchange of energies between a (human) performer and (human) spectator.

Is the absence of human bodies on stage a radical development?  I would counter that theater without human actors has a long history,  which includes  various  puppet theater, object  theater, and conceptual  performance works  (Bob Morris’  1960 falling column jumps to mind). You could even argue that Robert Wilson’s theater, which often equates the value of human bodies to that of objects and stage, is similarly challenging the personhood of the performer. Still, I do think that Hello Hi There is different from many of these predecessors, because it is explicitly about this question of what constitutes personhood.

Dorsen’s manifesto takes issue with the centuries-old tradition of audiences seeing themselves in theater, of looking up to the stage to find a reflection of a unified self and unified society.  Dorsen tries to interrupt this by putting onstage a computer-generated event, which can both engage the audience’s reflection and empathy, and simultaneously alienate and expose that empathy. For me this tactic falls into the same trap as much of posthuman discourse, which can be summarized as an effort to avoid a worldview that puts the human being at the center, and instead to radically include plant, animal, geologic, and technologic entities as adjacent or contiguous rather than as subservient in order to formulate new ways to conceptualize and act.

The recurrent snag in some posthuman discourse is that it still relies on the notion of human (as a negative theology, at least). This is evidenced not only by the word “human” still prominent, but more so in that the debate itself is almost entirely practiced by humans, and not by plant, animal, or geological entities. I suppose that technologies—that is, functional entities built by humans—have the best shot at “thinking” with us, and past us, until the very unity of an “us”  (us humans, us audience) ceases  to  cohere. The fusion of the human and technological is not a new idea, and even as it approaches, is not a comfortable one. Decades of science fiction has depicted various tense ways that this might come to pass.Hello Hi There may also be pointing toward such a possibility,  or at least  toward the stressed  and brittle juncture  that differentiates  “human”  from  everything  else.  Still, like most such work, Hello Hi There remains rooted in the division of “us” (the perceivers, thinkers, image-makers, i.e. the  creators),  and  them  (the  bodies  through  which  we compute, work,  and imagine,  i.e.,  the actors). To see if this is actually true, imagine a reverse “Hello Hi There”:  two human actors playing to an auditorium of computers.  Or better yet, two computers playing to an audience “of their own kind.”

Another point that might support my argument is the effect of the performance (as it actually was done) on its human audience. As Dorsen herself acknowledged, the effect of the piece was not isolating, rather it “…intensified the horizontal relationships between audience members.” It did this because the human audience could consider the technological bodies onstage as fundamentally different, and their own human bodies as being comparatively similar.  As much as Hello Hi There may point to a problematic unity of humanness, it also may functionally reinforce this unity.

This reminds me of another recent work that also operationally juxtaposes human and non-human minds and bodies.  Rachel Mayeri’s Primate  Cinema:  Apes as Family  is a split- screen film developed with, through, about and/or for groups of primates, scientists, actors and audiences. Mayeri, in co-operation with primatologist Sarah-Jane Vick, observed the preferences of primates to various televised images. Using the images and events primates liked best, Mayeri then made a fictional film featuring human actors dressed in monkey costumes. The completed fiction film was then screened for various audiences of primates. During these screenings, the primates watching  the film  were also  recorded, and this edited  recording  was added as a second channel  to the fiction film.  The two films, the original fiction film and the primates watching the original film, were then presented in a two-channel screening for various human audiences.  Here, Mayeri managed to budge the human/non-human hierarchy by creating a structure in which non-humans, via their spectatorship, could affect the form of what was created at various levels.

Are the conventions of time in the theater challenged by the algorithmic performers in Hello Hi There?  Dorsen’s notion that the algorithm exists before and after the performance is over does not mean that it continues to perform, any more than the text play of Ibsen’s Doll House (a pernicious algorithm of sorts) continues to perform once the actors go home. Similarly, the fact that any one iteration of Hello Hi There can be precisely repeated many times is not, in itself, a challenge; one can argue that, since Hello Hi There is a performance for a live (human) audience, any given performance (even of the same exact material) will necessarily differ, since the audience will experience it differently.

This point about temporality reminds me of the works of Finnish performance maker Tuija Kokkonen, who also made a series of pieces with, about, and for non-humans, focusing on the relationship between their various temporalities.  Within one sprawling larger project, her Chronopolitics – III Memo of Time, there was a space where Kokkonen asked audiences to read to a lichen-covered rock. Here the temporality of the performance became complicated, since the performance itself was constituted by the delicate symbiosis of the lichen and the reader, causally linking the (relatively short) time of reading to the (relatively long) duration of moss growing. The relevant point is that the temporal shift was made possible by a parallel shift between the human reader and the vegetal listener as the one who defines time. In introducing these works of Kokkonen and Mayeri, I wish to point to other artworks that place non-humans at the center of the piece, not only as subjects but as agents.

Annie Dorsen’s final point is that algorithmic theater challenges the notion that language is a window to consciousness, and (depending on how you define consciousness) this may be true. It is also important, though, to acknowledge that the role of language in Hello Hi There is crucial, not as a representation of consciousness, but as the process that allows it (the algorithm) to manifest itself.  Without language (code), the algorithm would cease to exist and that in this sense, too, language (both the output dialogue of the performance, and the code language of the operational algorithms themselves) continues to drive the event.

Note that,  by  taking  issue  with  the  implications  of  Dorsen’s  manifesto,  I  am  totally supporting her claim that her use of algorithms and technological bodies on stage provokes some of the most pressing  questions  about what happens during  a theatrical  event. I am suggesting that the interesting thing about “Hello Hi There” is precisely its seeming failure to displace the temporal and phenomenological knots of theater, despite the fact that it replaces a “living” process with a “programmed” one.  It’s funny that, from the few minutes I saw of the excerpt online, the dialogue of the computers makes it apparent that they (or their conversations) are smarter than we are. And somehow I think that this is deeply true.

Does theater require an exchange of energies between a performer and a spectator? Dorsen’s piece posits that it does not. But in the same play, her piece demonstrates that in theater, there is necessarily an exchange, an act of communication, for some observer somewhere. It may be that Hello Hi There is pointing to the complexity that underlies not only algorithms, but communication systems in general. The point is not that the dialogues of Chatbox Left and Chatbox Right reveal our anthropomorphic tendencies, but that language (i.e. communication) persists in the theater, that the two are inseparable, a that all further differences (between humans and non-humans, between competing temporalities, and between readings or “understanding”) flow from this.



[i] The title references Gregory Bateson’s “Metalogue: Why a Swan” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Bateson’s metalogues are written as dialogues between himself and his daughter, which both describe and instantiate an interrogation of knowing. An excerpt:
F: All right, let’s try to analyze what “sort of” means. Let’s take a single sentence and examine it. If I say “the puppet Petroushka is sort of human,” I state a relationship.
D: Between what and what?
F: Between ideas, I think.
D: Not between a puppet and people?
F: No. Between some ideas I have about a puppet and some ideas I have about people.
D: Oh.


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Hi everyone,

Here is the link to my blog comment:

http://hastac.org/blogs/merylalper/2013/02/14/connecting-disability-%E2%80%9Cconnected-learning%E2%80%9D#comment-21708

I think one may need a HASTAC account and be signed in to view comments, so I have included it below.

Thanks!

Haydee

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Thank you so much for your post.  It is an excellent point, that when considering access it is important to account for socioeconomic barriers in obtaining assistive technology: "The price range then for AAC can be mere cents or tens of thousands of dollars."  The advent of the iPad provided programs and parents with less economic resources a cheaper, more efficient, portable, and versatile device for non-verbal communicators.  I very much appreciate how this post framed the discussion around the difficulties faced by “non-dominant youth.”  The ending points on the importance of communities of practice addresses possible solutions to the isolation and lack of role-models issues encountered by “non-dominant youth.”  Access in this post accounts for the material and cultural effects of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices interfacing with or using the body.

The discussion around the panel "The Mentoring Program: Adult AAC Users Mentoring Child AAC Users,” is fascinating.  Considering the points of pairing based on the same AAC device and the “takeaway” of "perspective taking" provides a material dimension in considering the effectiveness of communication.  The nuance between two people using the same AAC device and engaging in perspective taking parallels the complexities of two people of differing subjectivities using the same verbal language.  For instance, the word "advocacy" may contain different connotations for a lawyer than an academic.

I find it extremely interesting and troubling that the language surrounding the goals of assistive technology emphasizes competition, contribution, functionality, and productivity.  All of these terms convey that the body worth technological intervention is the laboring body.  Thank you for engaging with the social aspects of educational and vocational uses of assistive technology. 
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