Conversation

So, the installation Indexing for Disability Justice, blocks, plates, boards, volumes and shafts relate to different kinds of…the best I've got so far is… conceptual buckets. Conceptual buckets for thinking through, this problem of indexing trans*crip tech. There are five buckets or sites: a volume to vibrate with, a shaft to direct with, a plate to contain with, a board to slide with, and a block to organise with.

Within each of these conceptual buckets, (also known as: sites of knowledge generation (thank you Leanne Betasamosake Simpson)), there are different research objects sitting at the intersection of what trans*crip tech might come to mean.

As sculptures they invite touch and they “contain” or “un-contain” or “hold space for”. Inside of the installation are stories (shared on this website) that shift perceptions and propose other starting points for technoscience, design and relationalities — reconfiguring who and what fits. The index begins with starting points around trans*gender and Disabled experiences — proposing what the possibilities can be when technology starts from our lived experiences.

All the technologies in the index, open up what can be understood as technology. They move with aesthetic questions of how trans* and Disabled experiences relate to one another and what the aesthetic specificity of our experiences are. The index considers questions about containment through forms (volumes, shafts, plates, boards and blocks) to sense through these forms, and to remain persistently slippery with consolidation too.

Lieks & Jara, could you speak a bit about containers and the ways in which trans*crip linguistic and other containers come up for you in your work? How do you find containers useful and used in your work and research? I have been mulling over (non/)containment with these volumes, shafts, plates, boards & blocks.

One thing, about you talking about the sculptures as conceptual buckets. I really like that visualization in terms of thinking about containment, since buckets are things that spill over.

For me, the discussion of linguistic containers makes me think of how Leslie Feinberg was thinking about the category of transgender. I've been thinking about, what does the category of Disability or the category of crip, or the category of trans*gender, how does that function as a container? What does it include? What does it enable? What does it exclude? What does it do?

I am thinking about this moment in the 90s in the US where these terms were really being (re)claimed and developed. In both cases, with the term Disability and with the term trans*gender. The way that they were used was so political and pragmatic in a way that feels very different from how we use them now. I have been thinking about the work of Simi Linton, a writer and activist who has this text called Claiming Disability.

In that text she writes: “We are everywhere these days, Wheeling and looping down the street, tapping our canes, sucking on our breathing tubes, following our guide dogs, puffing and sipping on the mouth sticks that propel our motorized chairs. We may drool, hear their voices, speak in staccato syllables. Wear catheters to collect our urine or live with a compromised immune system.” And then, she writes, “we are all bound together not by this list of collective symptoms, but by the social and political circumstances that have forged us as a group.”

And so, this idea of: we need a category to understand what forges us together as a group, even though we might have nothing in common. Actually, it might feel counterintuitive that somehow, we belong together because our experiences are totally different.

Something similar happens in Leslie Feinberg's way of thinking about trans*gender, where they write about it in the pamphlet, Transgender Liberation: a movement whose time has come from 1992. They say: "We've chosen words in this pamphlet we hope are understandable to the vast majority of working and oppressed people in this country, as a tool to battle bigotry and brutality. We are trying to find words, however inadequate, that can connect us, that can capture what is similar about the oppression we endure."

So, here there is this thing about thinking about words and categories as tools.

I thought this really resonated with how you were thinking about technologies and containment. There’s something about how these categories were not at all imagined functioning as a container, in the sense of adequately representing a group of people that have something in common. But actually, the opposite: to acknowledge that they are always inherently coalitional.

There's a group of people that have political reasons to be united, but it's always coalitional. It's not necessarily that they have something in common, but they need to unify to be able to organize. This is so different from how we understand or use some of this language today. Today, trans*gender and Disability feel a lot more stabilized in what terms refer to.

How do categories function as containers in terms of what kind of movements they enable? What kind of activity and relations do they enable? This is a question I see throughout all the objects that you have assembled in the index.

Yes, this framing of terms as containers as tools feels clear to me. For me it is about understanding what affordances and strategic necessity of claiming terms there could be — in order to get access. It is not the kind of slicing work that terminological work (when seeking to exclude) can do.

Yes, it shifts our interactions to thinking like, OK, how do we work with this? What do we do with this — and not necessarily a static understanding of well, what kind of person is this — or what kind of thing is this that would interact with this. It’s a lot more mobile.

In our last conversation, Jara, you mentioned something about the way in which all of these examples and practices shift the presumed ontology of the bodies that they bring together. For me this is really productive in terms of thinking about — if there is a way in which we can think about interacting with technology that does not have to fix a question in the moment.

I am always eager to engage in conversations about categories. They are indeed very generative politically and relationally and I am really moved by the way you brought these examples together.

To widen a bit this reality of categories. To bring in aesthetics also, because sometimes socioculturally, when we get into conversations about categories and in the technoscientific realm, in the sense of knowledge production - we discuss categories because of the damage that they have brought about. They have imposed taxonomies and classified forms of existence and produced an ontology (an understanding) of what counts.

We could speak about aesthetics in a way, in terms of redistributing the sensible: what gets to be sensed? In which ways? By whom?

It is a specific form of speaking about agency. Through the sensitive, sensible and field of sense making. In this open and vibrational field of aesthetics this can open up a question about categories.

There is an ongoing conflict, ongoing renegotiation and conflict.There is a political need and desire to keep ongoing, so not to close, or foreclose, not to not to arrive to a final consensus on what the categories are there. But to take care of the redistribution of the sensible, including an ontology of shape shifting aesthetics, constantly moving, constantly differing from one another and in constant tension. I think this is also generative — to think about categories, and this ontology they make from an aesthetic perspective.

I wanted to celebrate the way in which your work Ren is really in love with the slipperiness of language. This is also a form of bringing a language to feel more poetic and not so much of only description. Its not about the very technical accountability of the word.

Slipperiness is a form of an ongoing redistribution of the sensible in the linguistic realm. And when you do that many other forms also enter and become slippery fields - like spreadsheets, or containers which also overflow.

Thanks to poetics those very grey corners of the world like spreadsheets, gain some glitter in the political sense.

I was considering how these aesthetics, this repertoire, is full of invitation. Politicizing aesthetics not in signaling specific forms like the rectangle or volume but rather how they produce specific relationships and not others.

For example with Adolf Ratzka's car with a platform on the back. There is a demarcation of inside and outside. This is also an ongoing consideration in your practice, what and who defines the inside and the outside? But also the up and the down? A platform defines up and down. A rectangle defines what constitutes an angle. All the assimilated categories of the world that come with how we speak about aesthetics or aesthetic forms or front and back are quite quite present in the examples. Paying attention to these categories of up and down, front and back or inside or outside: they really provide space for considering. What is at stake? What is the encounter there? It breaks the assumed ontology of who and what. The work signals at the categories and the limits.

And to continue with the balloon, it is really generative. I think there is something about it as a technology: that is about relation. Here it is really in relation: a specific space trespassed by a specific set of waves. A specific set of sound waves in a movie theater, in circulation. I am trying to consider what the implications of an audience member bringing a balloon into a space as an audience member. As opposed to a track of subtitles that are injected into the materiality of a film.

The captions, stay. But this is a kind of vernacular technology, by the community, for the moment. It breaks with the assumption of inclusion as a “by default” thing. It’s not like movies or concerts come with balloons. For me it is a very important ontological difference of how the relation takes place. It's a chain of material realities interconnected. In this case, the balloon and the agencies of who makes the work of bringing it into the room for sensing. This carries along our conversation about agency and the politics of technology.

This is in contrast to Software as a Service which is present in so many frameworks around “SAS” which is the underlying logic of cloud computing. Which is at the same time based on a notion of agile computing. One of the characteristics of agile computing is that you install software on your individual machine and run it from there. So you are sort of “owning” the processing, but actually are renting a service for a software that runs elsewhere. The difference is massive. The difference of how agencies are distributed and how that logic is present in the managing of life on so many levels, from the individual to the collective to the environmental notion of of life. This terminology of “Life as a Service” is a form of trying to resist the imposition of universal logics that transverses forms. All the way from agricultural forms, to the fact that we recorded our conversation on a microsoft service.

But coming back to forms of resisting imposition and the notion of invitation, I have actually been thinking more about a practice of mediation. If I speak about mediation it is about putting elements, entities, forms of doing in connection when they were initially not so much connected, like provoking and inviting them to connect to one another. It's about paying attention to when a fragile connection can be cared for.

Making stronger the connection is, part of the mediation work and there is another part which is about intervening in in connections, intervening in relations to break them. (Which we need to do with SAS). Part of inviting to separate and inviting to break apart and to tear apart connections that have been there for too long in very violent manners. That's also part of the work with mediation. This is a key because it breaks with benevolent thinking. It's not necessarily about reuniting entities that are at risk of separating, but actually facilitating separation in ways that might facilitate a different circulation.

That might facilitate the finding of other circuits to continue existing, other habitats. Which is very present in your work, and in the cross temporal examples that Lieks has shared. So entities that might not be existing in the same time space that, can really be useful or generative for one another.

That work of inviting modes of doing or sensibilities that in the technoscientific technical canon belong to the past: is really key in technical political terms. I think that — working with the invitation of genealogy into the into the current conditions — is one of the strongest forms that we have to refuse the authoritarian imposition of the techno scientific canon in contemporary circumstances.

To think about this invitation, or practice of mediation to refuse, it feels like this kind of thinking that I am doing in making this Index for Disability Justice — this is about thinking against epistemicide. It is a generative site, an invitation to participate in another world building, one that has already been there. This work, for me, is about producing recognition and agency building around another parallel simultaneous world. Which has been under resourced and under recognized due to ongoing violent powers.

Its not about putting things into categories. Through doing this historical excavation, it is also about widening the categories themselves so the same epistemic violence and reduction doesn’t keep happening. Its not to say “we want more space in this broken system” but to break the system through the research and to seek and find more possibility through this breaking.

In my practice, I'm always thinking about and staying close to Jara's work on The Manual for Digital Discomfort, as a guide to think about how we can stay uncomfortable with technological processes, and as a way to resist their normalization and subsequent foreclosures that are produced by processes of normalization.

I was curious about this in terms of building collective capacity for discomfort with technology. Could you speak about this, Jara?

I can start by giving a bit of context to this notion of discomfort that has appeared in my practice as part of a research framework I shared with Cristina Cochior and Karl Moubarak, which we called the Cell for Digital Discomfort. In that framework we tried to do several things at the same time and it's an ongoing conversation. One thing was to problematize the ways in which discomfort is a valuable condition for digital experience. The individual experience that expands to the collective expands in a very particular way: through repetition and multiplication. The over present narrative that mainstream digital corporations sell is that they can provide comfort for everyone in the same manner. There are small modifications which are more like superficial adaptations of that experience, but the inherent experience is ruled by the repeated logics of what counts as comfortable. So that very limited understanding of comfort and how it is imposed by repetition in every aspect of digitized life was our initial departure point from which to then problematize from.

From the legacy of free libre and open source software communities, we are attentive to how these communities also swallowed the pill of comfort. When we say comfort we then mean the package that includes colonial operations like: optimisation, efficiency, efficacy and so forth. Together we opened up that package and tried to understand how each of each of those descriptors of reality are fabricated industrially. This was important for us as a queer and anti-colonial form of of research and was about more discomfortable forms of relating to computation.

That's why the Cell for Digital Discomfort stayed with this difficult question of: how could we provide ourselves with forms of discomfort that might have to do with how, in the physical world where you would find yourself when you enter a squat — instead of a home to rent from the market. A form of discomfort that has to do with needing to engage with the material shaping of a space. With the decision making of how it functions, with the roughness of encountering conflict on the go or also probably never finding it fully constructed or fully finished. So that form of discomfort for us was very, very useful and I think it has to do with that question that you were asking of how to build collective capacity for discomfort with technological regimes.

If we understand technology in the wide sense as very material encounters with reality, and also in the linguistic encounters with it that we are discussing here. This collective capacity is fundamental. It's an active refusal of the individual capacity for discomfort, which then produces a situation of isolating realities, and also repeats very standardized mechanisms — these are not the kind of standards that we want to fight.

I’m also thinking about this question of the collective capacity for discomfort, in relation to another question from you Ren, about universal design. This pairing of discomfort and accessibility is really interesting to probe a bit. This dream of an environment that can be fully accessible for all bodies, right? Which is, so ambitious and so arrogant in a way.

Universal design de-politicizes Disability by taking away friction or discomfort that we hope for. It invites encounters and interactions that are smooth, without friction, designed in a way to enable that. Where the design isn't noticeable anymore, so you don't have to experience friction. That everyone is orchestrated or choreographed to not have any failure anymore. When I think about the actual practice of accessibility, then the thing that you just keep running up against again and again is precisely that: constant failure.

With accessibility there is the fact that you don’t know and that you will never fully know all the ways in which all the bodies could be. All the possible bodily functions that you need to take into account. And all the possible frictions that might be between your needs, somebody else's needs, the space, the materials, et cetera, et cetera. So that's something that, when we organize, or when we teach, or when we interact we have all of these questions to deal with.

Accessibility is like this ongoing question that doesn't have a solution, right? And so collective capacity for discomfort seems really crucial. A desire for accessibility that has to reckon with really a practice of not knowing it completely and develop a practice of not having it figured out, of not having it solved.

Just one thing to put next to that. So, I wrote down ‘conflicting access needs’ which is also something that happens when we're in collective spaces together where we all need different things and they don't align with each other. But I'm also wondering…. I think the dream that you put forward here around the environment that could be fully accessible for all bodies… I think because of the deeply ableist society that we live in, it's also sometimes even hard for ourselves to have the dream of asking for what we would need.

So, I also wonder Lieks, what would you also say to the situation of the tension around questions of access. There is still the ongoing situation that we're not all also learning sign languages when we're growing up, right? There are just extremely structural things that are about the ableist societies that we live in: that keep people separate. And, because of the ableist society that we live in, there often isn't the capacity often to negotiate conflicting access needs because of it.

So I'm stuck in this tension between — wanting to have a space that would allow for us all — to actually all be there. And this failed dream of universal design. I'm wondering, how do you negotiate the dreaming of what it is that we want to have — with the extreme ableism that is normalized within societies?

Absolutely. That question really goes to the heart of collective capacity. How do we insist on accessibility?

For me the distinction that I had in mind was more between the idea that you can you can reach some end point or have some sort of confidence or security or something — versus a kind of ongoing practice where you're constantly confronted with not knowing and with friction. But adding to what you were just saying now — how do we, in the practice of being with friction, still hold on to some element of the dream. As a drive and as force that propels us to keep working on our access practices.

The question of access, always has a normative direction to it. Like who gets access to want, or what are the things that we actually make accessible. Rather than: what do we need to completely undo or unlearn and relearn to have a totally different understanding of directionality, what gets accessible to who. It raises more questions again that have to do with minoritarian practices, political practices and aesthetic practices that have their own cultural forms.

I think this takes us back to how you phrased it before, Lieks, that frameworks or terms are always inherently coalitional.

They are not attempts to fix static blocks of sensibilities, or collective needs or positionalities. But they actually recognize the importance of this ongoing struggle being always inherently, coalitional — I think it is very liberatory. It is not sticking to fixed positions and which might then not be helpful in the in the present struggle. But would rather then be counter productive where the conditions get modified or when the ‘universally in the making’ gets naturalized. And then the coalition needs to be different.

I think the way in which you were speaking of being always inherently coalitional, it's a different way of also saying always inherently vernacular. Because the vernacular doesn't need to be connected to a particular definition of collective or of community or of group of shared struggle. The vernacular opens up the notion of what can start to be defined, as something that defines the cultural engagement, the political engagement and the relation, within limits.

There are thinkers who say it like: we don't have something common, yet we have to come together. I think about this through the work of bell hooks. I was teaching this text, Racism and Feminism: The Issue of Accountability — and basically it's this really long chapter where she's detailing how feminism and the women's movement has always been racist. It's just example, after example, after example. And yet at the end - she says feminism is a project she's still invested in. Her way to make it work is to think of it as a coalitional project — as something where we don't have a shared foundation at all, actually quite the opposite.

In inviting a wider historical perspective, the Index is not putting the same frameworks in the making, as that inspired the need for the making. It is a commitment of keeping a wide span of time open.

Like the chat of the Berlin demo (2025), cohabiting next to the Compensation film(1999) - these are cross temporal situations. This for me is a political position of breaking with the imposition of the really contemporary definition of what counts as tech, when thinking about a history of technology.

Yes, and for me, its also about breaking a relationship to linear time entirely. I think about this next to Ellen Samuels's writing Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time. In the film stills I share in the Index, there's a something about competing access needs and finding ways of communicating, as well as the materiality of the board and instrument used to communicate.

At the demo, my experience was that at some point it became too intense for me and I went home and followed the demo from the couch. Had I not been there, I wouldn't have been able to get access to the chat.

And then I did send it to other friends and so then lots of us had access. So in the block to organize with — this is how trans*crip organizing works, right? Like, when I had top surgery, someone sent me their care calendar and then I learned all the things I needed to look into, and then I sent that on to other people. Its’ a sharing we do and its not about linear time.

Jara, earlier you said something about the assumed ontology of technologies and I have a lot of thoughts and confusions around thinking about technology, in relation to trans*ness or Disability. One thing I'm thinking about is how trans and Disabled people are seen as overly reliant on technology or needing particular technologies. Also, technologies that shape bodies, alter bodies, to move with, all of these things.

I don't have my mind made-up because of course there's an argument to be made about a very expansive vision of technology in terms of what all bodies need in order to be in the world. But I also like thinking quite specifically about these crip and trans* technologies as crip and trans* technologies. So that they don't need to be justified by pointing at how all people use technology.

Lieks, I wanted to ask you something around about a politics of non-justification for trans* and crip experiences? I’m wondering here if this is aligned with a politics of anti-assimilation? Or what non-justification might be like - if you have an idea or an example?

I think this is connected to normative discussions around how trans* and Disabled bodies are seen as more technologized or overly reliant on technologies. This has been a really interesting debate for me, and my own position shifts a lot. On the one hand, all bodies are technologized, right? We see this in work of somebody like Paul Preciado: thinking about how all gender is prosthetic. How does gendered embodiment materialize through technological practices, rituals, etcetera, etcetera. I often repeat versions of this argument, for political reasons. There is a lot at stake in refusing a distinction between some imagined natural body versus trans* and Disabled bodies as somehow more artificial because use of medical technologies.

We, then, think of examples to show how non-trans* people or non-Disabled people also rely on technology. I joke with my students about amateur body builders and how they use hormones. So, we do these rhetorical gestures, but I'm increasingly not satisfied with this anymore.

I think the desire behind making these arguments is exactly this problem of justification or legitimization — to say somehow that we are not a burden. By using technologies, which are seen as asking something from the public: public resources, funding or public infrastructure.

So, it's somehow that you're a burden or are placing some sort of demand that you are then asked to justify. I think your work is also thinking about this. Indexing technologies and thinking about the specificities of technologies has been really inspiring for me to let go of the way we also participate in this generalization — in order to justify or legitimize.

I've also been quite inspired by the work of the poet Kay Gabriel, she has this way of centralizing this question of desire. Thinking about gender transition as a form of desire.

Trans* desire, desire for a transition or a change. Gabriel argues will never be able to say: it's right, or wrong. We will never be able to evaluate it on any of those terms. The point is — transsexual desire is real. And that we’re doing something by placing the demand on the world to use resources to intervene in our bodies.

And, of course, this intervention, causes friction, and this intervention is also a gift. The gift is that you're inviting everybody to practice living a disalienated life. In that intervention, you’re asking for that possibility.

What you're just saying now also reminds me, I just finished Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation, just translated into German & English from Maria Clara Araújo dos Passos — originally written in Brazilian Portugese.

In the afterword Luce de Lire, this philosopher based in Berlin, speaks about gender euphoria along some of the lines you’re mentioning here. Where the desire towards one gendered experience has nothing to do with a negative positioning or through dysphoria, uneasiness or fear. But rather — transition as a way to finding out how gendered embodiments can bring possibility for oneself. (Gender) Euphoria as an infrastructure of possibility, something that makes us feel good and makes possibility through its making. It makes me smile to think about it.

An article described Kay’s work as hedonistic, which I thought was a nice way of thinking about it. Like, yeah, it is about pleasure actually, and it is about not having to justify why we need pleasure.

That has been so useful for me because so much of justifying the need for things is really oriented towards mitigating harm. You don’t need to be depressed or suicidal in order to get something. Its really not a good enough framework to think about how you actually mitigate risk. The question rather is: how do we really, really without apology, centralize again and again the aesthetic right of pleasure.

I was thinking about the plate section and the idea of compression. What I find interesting is how these forms help us rethink what the feeling of being restricted means. Sometimes restrictive technologies are also profoundly enabling or help you actually be less restrictive. So this idea of assuming that certain technologies restrict the body in certain ways, but actually have a very different usage or outcome.

Yes, in the Index that’s there as weighted blankets, compression shirts, breastplates and iron lungs. They are both additive and are compressing towards — all towards some relief + embodied need. Its a slippery between them - what is a plate? Its is a very divergent set of embodied experiences it refers to.

Yeah. Restricting technologies such as binders can be enabling in many ways, including developing a particular relationship to space, but they also constrain movement and fold the body in a certain way. These technologies are complicated.

Like the pharmacon, multi salient technologies.

Can you say more about what you just said, the how to speak about things?

Totally, so for example, I was thinking about how agency is centered in all of the entries in the index. Whose agency is being spoken about. That is a very clear question to me throughout this project.

In the making of, Indexing for Disability, Justice, blocks, plates, boards, volumes and shafts, I am thinking about how forms are described and in this I am centering the agency of who's made the things. Or what context they are made in or addressing.

This comes up clearly in the one example from Adolf Ratzka. So there's this one entry in the index where Werner Herzog is filming him - its in his film “Behinderte Zukunft” or in English, “Disabled Future”. In the film, theres a scene where we see a board on the back of a box truck — we are seeing Ratzka’s car which has been constructed by an engineering class so that he could drive around. Also, in the index, there is another board from Ratzka — where he is sharing another kind of board on own self-published website — one that he uses to move his body around. Both boards have to do with moving his body around, and one is someone else showing (Herzog) and then the other is he himself showing on his own website. That's a really clear example, to me, of how other people have been telling, from a non-Disabled perspective, a story about his life.

The reason why I'm allowing that representation — because there is such a violence of non-Disabled people representing Disabled people without our agency. And I did have a question of whether I should just pull that entry entirely — however I didn’t because Ratzka is engaging, on his own terms, through his own self publishing similar questions on documenting how he moves his body around.

In learning about Ratzka I understand that he was involved with and inspired by the Independent Living Movement happening in the 1970's and 80's in the US. I found Ratzka in the Archive Behindertenbewegung (Archive of the German Disability Rights Movement). He was writing back to the German Disability Rights movement, reporting on the Independent Living movement in the US in California where he was living at the time. In the German Disability Rights Magazine, "Die Randschau: Zeitschrift für Behindertenpolitik" from April 1986 there is an article where Ratzka is speaking about the Independent Living Movement in the USA and reporting back to his Disabled community in Germany, on how life was for him, in the US then.

So I am thinking here about how this representation of Ratzka, from Werner Herzog, could be potentially extractive. But in this case, I would venture that Ratzka was using visibility, strategically to share another version of what life could be. To share what was happening in the US, to send back reports, of how things could be different. In this way, representation operates in a few directions at once. He represents himself on his own terms on his website, he shares documentation of his life through this fairly well known documentarian (Herzog), and he writes back to his country of origin to prompt other ways of living.