Episode 2.5: Emily Watlington- Show Notes and Transcript

Simple English summary:

How are disabled artists, critics, and curators shaping the discourse about accessibility? In this episode of Contra*, I talk to Emily Watlington about her work as a curator of disability arts, thought, and practice, particularly around audio-visual media, captioning and description, and access labor.

Themes:

Accessibility in museums
Art about disability and by disabled artists
Disabled artists using assistive technologies as artistic interventions
Alt-text and image description
What gets left out of definitions of accessibility
Expertise and consulting

Introduction Description:

The podcast introductory segment is composed to evoke friction. It begins with sounds of a wheelchair rhythmically banging down metal steps, the putter of an elevator arriving at a person’s level, and an elevator voice saying “Floor two, Floor three.” Voices begin to define Contra*. Layered voices say “Contra is friction…Contra is…Contra is nuanced…Contra is transgressive…Contra is good trouble…Contra is collaborative…Contra is a podcast!…Contra is a space for thinking about design critically…Contra is subversive…Contra is texture…”

An electric guitar plays a single note to blend out the sound.

The rhythmic beat of an electronic drum begins and fades into the podcast introduction.

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Episode Introduction:

Welcome to Contra*: the podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. This show is about the politics of accessible and critical design—broadly conceived—and how accessibility can be more than just functional or assistive. It can be conceptual, artful, and world-changing.

I’m your host, Aimi Hamraie . I am a professor at Vanderbilt University, a designer and design researcher, and the director of the Critical Design Lab, a multi-institution collaborative focused on disability, technology, and critical theory. Members of the lab collaborate on a number of projects focused on hacking ableism, speaking back to inaccessible public infrastructures, and redesigning the methods of participatory design—all using a disability culture framework. This podcast provides a window into the kinds of discussions we have within the lab, as well as the conversations we are interested in putting into motion. So in coming episodes, you’ll also hear from myself and the other designers and researchers in the lab, and we encourage you to get in touch with us via our website, www.mapping-access.com or on Twitter at @criticaldesignl

Interview Transcript:

Aimi:

I'm so excited to welcome Emily Watlington to the podcast today. Emily is an assistant editor at Art in America, and she was also recently a Fulbright scholar in Berlin, and has worked as a curatorial research assistant at the MIT Liszt Visual Arts Center. We actually met a couple years ago through a course that she was teaching at the department of architecture at MIT. Welcome, Emily.

Emily Watlington:

Hi, thank you for having me.

Aimi:

I thought we could start by talking about your work as an art curator and art critic and the ways that you're bringing disability studies frameworks to that.

Emily Watlington:

Let's see, well, I guess my first year of art school was when I first got Lyme disease and my health was at its worst, and so I really came to understand art at the same time I was understanding how to navigate my body in a new, inaccessible world. To me, those have always gone hand in hand just in my own upbringing and understanding of art. A lot of work I was doing as an art school freshman was about, as a person with an invisible disability was trying to make some of that visible in the way I would navigate this convoluted campus to avoid stairs and things like this. More recently ... At that time I didn't really know anything about disability studies or anything like that, and more recently I've gotten to learn, through so many really interesting and important artists, about their work in a similar vein of what I was thinking about as a freshman, although a little more ... Yeah, more researched and part of a community. That's been really rich.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, in terms of concrete things I've worked on, I guest edited a special issue of Art Papers on disability and the politics of visibility that Aimi contributed to. Yeah, trying to always in my practice lift up disabled voices by highlighting artists who are working with this topic or are disabled. Last year ... I think it was last year. I wrote an essay on artists working with closed captions as a medium, and I was really interested in how this was taken up not just as compliance but as a space for creativity and criticism. Yeah, also artists like Carolyn Lazard who's trying to imagine a new form of audiovisual media that is not just, okay, we have an inaccessible media and then an add on that makes it accessible, which is the caption. Or Christine Sun Kim, who is dealing with how just silly it is to try to describe these abstract sounds in a single word, and all these funny captions that come out of that. I've been thinking more and more about how museums are ... Videos shown in museums are held to lower accessibility standards than on Netflix or at the movie theater, and how just sad that is.

Aimi:

Who were some of the first disability artists that you came into contact with?

Emily Watlington:

I'd say Park MacArthur. I helped curate a show at the Liszt called An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art that she participated in. It was a collection of various medical objects. I'm remembering now that one of them was straws, and this is before the straw ban controversies. That's pretty interesting. But yeah, how these objects which we might consider sterile or cold are actually used as objects of care.

Aimi:

When did you come into contact with disability community or disability culture?

Emily Watlington:

I think it's mostly from having worked with Park, and then another artist named Andrea Crespo who's autistic. We did a show with him. I'll have to look up the date. I think it was 2016?

Aimi:

When I met you, you were organizing a course on disability and access and code at MIT. Do you want to say a little bit about that?

Emily Watlington:

Yeah. That was something I cooked up with my partner, who's an architect, and it's just such a ... I don't know, I think such a rare field for architects to be work with. Talking with you and Shannon recently, and about ... There's the problem of retrofitting and making things accessible which were not built that way before the ADA, but then even still with all these new construction projects there's things that might technically comply but are not accessible in many ways, or there's ... The code, I think it's so important that it's strict because it helps protect people, but sometimes there can be silly things that happen. Gabe, my partner, was dealing with how the legal regulation for ramps and the regulation for the slope of seatings in theaters are a few degrees different, which makes these sort of absurd scenarios for how you might have to navigate a building that has both of these things. But yeah, also code I think is taught to a lot of architecture students as, this is something you have to do, not this is a place where you can do important and creative work.

Aimi:

Yeah. Something I really appreciated about the syllabus that you created for the course was that you were bringing together all of these different thinkers and practitioners to talk about topics that would introduce a critical framework into that architectural school space. It was really speaker focused, and it was different than a studio course.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, my background would be more in writing and theory rather than architecture school and practice, so I definitely want to bring that to the table.

Aimi:

Yeah, it seems like it was a really productive collaboration, too.

Emily Watlington:

Thank you.

Aimi:

Yeah, cool. More recently, you did this special issue of Art Papers, which was really beautiful and had a lot of great stuff in it. What was your approach to getting together the pieces that eventually went into that?

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, it's funny with editing things like this, because it just changes so much over time. You have an idea for what's its going to be about, and then contributors come and approach your idea in all these different ways that you couldn't have anticipated, which is great and I really love that that happens. Yeah, the theme was originally disability and the politics of visibility, but so much that I ... I don't know, so many of the contributors were focused on maybe invisibility, or at least refuting some of the hypervisibility a la the freak show that can be super problematic in thinking about disability, or Park MacArthur's contribution was a response to her exhibition at MOMA, which was really ... I would say the primary piece was an audio tour of the show, that way people could have similar experiences of the show, and her contribution didn't have images, but rather we included the stops on the audio tour as a way to think about how to make it accessible to blind and low vision audiences. But yeah, in general I just loved that it kept getting bigger and bigger. Instead of working toward answers to these problems, it just expanded them.

Aimi:

Yeah. One thing I was thinking about with that issue of Art Papers was that you were making a field of thinking more apparent by bringing all these perspectives together, and that's a curatorial ... It's a scholarly curatorial practice, too. What are some of the ways of thinking about disability art that you're seeing emerging now?

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, thank you. Well, one thing with that issue is a lot of these people are often working together, that instead of being included or at least are aware of each other, and ended up contributing multi author or collaborative things, which I think ... Yeah, disability studies has a lot to ... It's a great model for thinking about interdependence and things like this, and I really appreciated that that was something people wanted to ... I don't know, to model as a method and not just a topic. In terms of how I've seen people thinking about that today, it's a good question. I do think there's a growing awareness of the accessibility of art spaces which is especially rough in New York, where I've only recently moved.

Emily Watlington:

But with that is some pushback, too. I'm a person that is sensitive to strobes, and there's so infrequently strobe warnings at art events, and I in fact find, when I ask people are really defensive and want to protect their right to use strobes, which ... I don't know, I don't want to question someone's right to use them necessarily, but I ... Yeah, I guess one thing that I really appreciate about disability is within disability community their sense of, hey, I can talk to you about my bodily needs and trust you to hear me, but in a lot of the world, bodies are awkward and uncomfortable to talk about, and people feel called out if you try to ask for your needs when that's not necessarily your intention.

Aimi:

Yeah, so do you see disability arts culture somehow intervening within the broader art space around that?

Emily Watlington:

Yeah. I think one thing it's really powerful for, especially in thinking about some of these videos that dealt with close captions, like Carolyn's Lazard's video A Recipe for Disaster, which his an episode of Julia Child's cooking show, and Julia Child's describing most of what she's doing, so there's already a visual description component built in, but then Carolyn adds to that and puts the closed captions on it because it was, I guess, one of the first shows, or maybe the first show to have closed captions, but then people ... Or actually they were open captions, so there were always captions on, and then people complained, and now we don't have open captions on all of our TV shows. But then it turns into this manifesto about accessibility in the arts. What I think that does is it sets a positive example of, this is what people could do, and rather than I guess the critic, there's a lot of saying you did this wrong. But as an artist it's like, here's a model of how it could be. I think that's really powerful and can be really inspiring.

Aimi:

Yeah. Yeah, so in these cases, there's Carolyn Lazard, also Liza Silvester who does a similar thing.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah.

Aimi:

We just did an episode with her. The technique is the use of this available technology as a discursive space, basically, and to populate that with some other kind of discourse.

Emily Watlington:

Totally.

Aimi:

In the example that I talked to Liza about, we had this really interesting conversation because I had watched the video of her show, so there were all these layers of mediation. I'd watched the video of her show, and in the video I could see the screen and hear the sound of what was in the film that Liza was critically captioning. Then I could see the differences between what the caption said and what the speaker on the screen was saying. When I was talking to her about this I was like, the speaker on the screen is saying X, and then over here you're saying Y. She was like, actually I don't know what the speaker on the screen was saying because this film was never captioned, and so this is the first time I'm even learning about this disjuncture. There's something really interesting and powerful about that, too, that it's not just a direct protest about content or something, although that does seem to come into it sometimes, but it's just about taking up the space that is available and using it to do something else.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I love in the piece Caption Channel Surfing there's a comment ... I don't know, I think it's a princess movie or just some hetero love story, and Liza just comments, he leads the way, of course. I thought that was, one, hilarious, and two, it just sums up ... I don't know, are your movies so precious and brilliant that you couldn't modify them to be more accommodating? Is this what you're clinging onto?

Aimi:

Yeah, and that that kind of misogyny or whatever is apparent from the relations between bodies on the screen.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, exactly.

Aimi:

Yeah, I love that, and I'm looking also at your art in Moose Magazine where you write about these various artists, and Carolyn Lazard's piece. There's a screenshot of Julia Child's, and there is a caption there that says, "So how's that for a last minute supper party?" Then on the screen it's like... There's this other type of captioning that says, "Then no one gets any, image and sound that cannot be disentangled, a suffusion, a cacophony." Yeah, so what do you make of that dual captioning technique?

Emily Watlington:

Over the course of the video, first it starts out in a rather standard combination of closed captions and image descriptions, so sounds are described and in the lulls between Julia Child's monologue, which are few and far between because she's kind of talking the whole time, a voice will describe what Julia Child is doing. But it's actually so ... Ooh, the light just went out. It's really hard to fit these descriptions in between these breaks in dialog, and you can sense the ... I don't know, tension or rushedness that comes with this constraint. Then it starts pushing outside of that limit of the amount of time between breaks in the monologue, and then it becomes this total cacophony. Yeah, it's the layering of the Julia Child and this manifesto about accessible media that I think is really brilliant.

Aimi:

Some of that manifesto is like a commentary on the way that the image descriptions are usually done in the spaces between speech?

Emily Watlington:

I don't think it means that specifically, but you can ... When watching it you can sense that they're being forced to fit in these spaces and then they can't fit, and then there's all this illegibility. Then the idea is that if this is illegible for some people, then let's make it illegible for everyone.

Aimi:

Yeah. Yeah, it says, "No legibility for some, illegibility for all, a sensory failure, a redistribution of violence." Yeah, wow. Yeah, what else do you want to say about these ... The politics of captioning as a site for intervention?

Emily Watlington:

Yeah. In that essay I have this quote from David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, who are also part of the course you participated in (you spoke alongside them) that I really love. In Carolyn's video there's a line that's like, I don't know ... Something about, we don't have to be grateful for an invitation to your party because your party sucks. The idea of captioning as this act of charity that, oh, now you can watch this show on how to cook an omelet, and it's similar to Liza's comment on the hetero love stories too. But there's this quote from David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder about ... They're talking about neoliberal inclusionism and this idea of getting invited to the party, and they write that, "Disability subjectivities are not just characterized by socially imposed restrictions, but in fact productively create new forms of embodied knowledge and collective consciousness." Then they talk about the active transformation of life that the alternative corporealities of disability creatively entail. Yeah, different bodies demand different forms, and instead of, oh, we have to make a lesser version of that to make it accessible, it's like, actually we could rethink the whole thing and learn a lot from doing so.

Aimi:

Yeah. Yeah, that's a really great point. It's kind of about this disability politics of anti-assimilation, too.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, totally.

Aimi:

Yeah, that was something that Liza talked about a lot as well. Something really interesting that she said was that she ... This is in the podcast episode with her, that as a hard of hearing person who is not part of deaf culture and community, her experience of ... Some of her experiences of disability are about estrangement and misfit, and in that way she relates more to an anti-assimilationist queer positioning than a deaf culture positioning.

Emily Watlington:

Totally, I see that, yeah.

Aimi:

Yeah. I thought that was really interesting.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, definitely.

Aimi:

Go ahead.

Emily Watlington:

I'm thinking about also, in Sunaura Taylor's book she talks about, which is Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, she talks about ... She's vegan and I'm vegetarian. It talks about that as being a thing where you're constantly having to ask for accommodations, and a way I see our relationship is, there's such a big difference between the vegetarian option being, oh, we'll just take the meat off the burger and you can eat the bread, or we'll rethink the burger and put a lovely portobello mushroom in the middle and it's going to be great. But yeah, this mentality of the alternative is where we take away, or it's the lesser version, rather than an opportunity to recreate it.

Aimi:

Yeah, definitely. In a similar vein, my friends who are vegans, now that the Beyond Meat burger has come out, a lot of them are very resistant to it because they're like, this is the aesthetics of industrial meat agriculture. Why would we want something that bleeds? You can just keep that violent aesthetic trope and we'll be over here eating our portobello mushrooms.

Emily Watlington:

For sure. Mushrooms are great. It's not ...

Aimi:

Yeah, totally. Yeah, there's so many possibilities I think for thinking with food and eating around access.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, for sure.

Aimi:

Related to this, too, another artist that we have talked about and with together, whose work I think touches on a lot of these themes, is Shannon Finnegan.

Emily Watlington:

Yes.

Aimi:

Yeah, so is there anything you want to say about Shannon's work, like Alt-text as Poetry or anything like that?

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, where to start? Yeah, what a great project those workshops are, and thinking about ... Yeah, how to describe images, especially artworks for web access. I went to one of those workshops and I think about it all the time, and I just wish I had ... Part of me wants guidance and answers for how to describe images and artworks the right way, but it doesn't work like that.

Aimi:

What are the workshops like? Can you take us through it?

Emily Watlington:

Yeah. Basically she and her collaborator Bojana I believe is her name ... I went to one where only Shannon was teaching, but she describes what alt-text is, why it matters, what the ADA has to say about it, and things like this, and then walks through ... She'll print out a few images. Some are of people, some are of artworks, and you get to workshop writing descriptions and compare notes, and it's always so interesting to see what things seem obvious and stand out to you, and someone else talks about something entire different, especially with artworks, and especially abstract ones. I think a lot of the standards treat images as information, which of course they often are, but they're also aesthetic experiences, and these things that are a lot harder to put into words. At the same time, as an art critic, something I really think it can be really powerful is a succinct, powerful description of an artwork that makes you see it in a new light or notice things maybe you wouldn't have noticed. Another big topic is how hard it can be to describe people's race and gender, and how weird it feels to not mention it. That's something I think about all the time when I'm writing descriptions, and I truly have no answers for.

Aimi:

Yeah. What were some of the exercises you went through at the workshop to work through some of those questions?

Emily Watlington:

For the race and gender question, she would give a picture of a person and you would describe them, and it was up to you if you wanted to try to guess or not. Then she would give you the description of how that person described that picture of themselves, which sometimes can be more personal. If you're maybe describing a picture of you on your Instagram you might assume that people know who you are and not say, I am XYZ, but this is me in a hat, or whatever. Yeah, so you would also see if they chose to describe their race and gender, or the sort of more personal tone. Yeah.

Aimi:

Yeah, that does raise all sorts of questions, because of the identities that are taken as given and neutral, that often wouldn't get described, depending on the audience and the space that they're in.

Emily Watlington:

Totally. Georgina Kleege writes about this in terms of descriptions in movies, and people will describe especially race if they see it as essential to the plot, but of course that varies wildly depending on who's watching.

Aimi:

Yeah. I also sometimes teach image description workshops, and based on Georgina Kleege's participatory image description practice, and the thing that people always ask about is race and gender. There are real differences between when people ask because they're rooted in a social justice culture where they know to ask for pronouns and that kind of stuff, and when people aren't. I've been in conversations in the university where I work about whether we should have image descriptions of faculty or student headshots on websites, and people feel very uncomfortable with even self describing their images. Or I went through a university sponsored workshop where we were taught how to create accessible web content, and when it came to images the best practice that they said was just to say, this is a photo of so-and-so, and not give any information about them. I was like, wait a second. If I'm looking at a faculty page or a student page and I'm like, wow, everyone here is white, that's really important information to know.

Emily Watlington:

Definitely, yeah.

Aimi:

That you wouldn't get if you just had, "image of" and then the person's name.

Emily Watlington:

Right. Yeah, the other tricky thing this brings up is, as AI is increasingly learning to write these descriptions, it's pretty scary to teach machines to see race. What does it even mean to ... Of course to see it, but to identify based on looking at someone is tricky, and yeah, the way that that opens us up to this mass surveillance that can be discriminatory.

Aimi:

Yeah, totally, and brings back all these phrenological and criminological things about identifying facial structures and stuff.

Emily Watlington:

Right, exactly.

Aimi:

Yeah, so that's a place where access and disability culture and art has the opportunity to make an intervention and to make a clear statement about access versus surveillance and that sort of thing.

EmilyWatlington:

Yeah, for sure.

Aimi:

Yeah.

Emily Watlington:

And yeah, brings up at least in the art world a labor question. Who is writing those descriptions? At a time when a lot of small arts institutions don't have people devoted to working on access. Increasingly a lot of artists, when a publication or whomever asks for images, will provide the descriptions. I don't think it's because it should be their job, but it's more like, you can't count on the institution to do it for you.

Aimi:

Yeah, totally. My lab is curating an exhibition called crip ritual that will be in Toronto in 2021, and one of the ... We're putting up a call with this season of contra, so I'll make sure to send it to you.

Emily Watlington:

Great, please do.

Aimi:

But one of the things we decided was that a condition of showing work in that show needed to be that everyone would go through a design charrette to figure out how to make the presentation of their work more accessible, including having the artist themselves write image descriptions, but doing a workshop about how to do that and how to caption and all of those kinds of things. We were trying to figure out this issue of labor, about who knows best about what is in the image, or who can most ethically describe it, and how do we get away from this standard style of description, too, that might happen if one person is doing all of it?

Emily Watlington:

That's awesome. I believe Shannon's doing a project at Banff in Canada right now, which is having multiple people describe an artwork, the idea being sometimes they're presented as this authorless, neutral, authoritative thing, but to attribute them to people and to show that many people can emphasize different things, and to make that process visible.

Aimi:

Yeah, there's a related practice I think in the social media image description sphere, that really only I ever encounter disabled people doing this, where they'll share a Facebook post and copy/paste the previous person's image description with credit, and then sometimes there'll be an editorial note like, the original image description also didn't say X, Y and Z, and so I'm going to add this extra thing to it. Yeah, I've been interested to watch how that happens. There are some Facebook groups too where people do participatory image description. If you need something described you can just post it and then the whole comments section is various descriptions of that thing.

Emily Watlington:

Cool.

Aimi:

Yeah, it'll be cool to watch those techniques continue to evolve.

Emily Watlington:

Definitely.

Aimi:

Yeah. Who are artists that you're interested in that are emerging and working in these areas?

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, I just finished writing about an artist named Emily Gossiaux who is blind but lost her vision while she was in art school, so yeah, was trained rather traditionally in art making and art history, and she does a lot of work making ... In art school you learn a technique called blind contour drawings, which is ... Sometimes you put the paper under the table and you don't look at it at all and you'll focus really intently on your subject, and the idea is to teach you to draw what you see, not what you know, so to focus on really closely on what you're drawing and not what your drawing looks like. Yeah, she does her own version of that technique based on touching her subject or remembering them, and uses a ballpoint pen and newsprint paper so that there's an indentation, and then she colors them with Crayola crayons that have really descriptive names, like Piggy Pink and Almond and Outer Space are some of the colors she's using. It's, yeah, cool how those can be a tool. Yeah, and a lot of her subjects are dealing with intimacy, and they're pretty silly, and her guide dog London, who is really beautiful and sweet is often in her work.

Aimi:

I love that. I should say, so in your new position at Art in America, this is a lot of the work that you're continuing to do, right?

Emily Watlington:

Yeah. Yes, I run a column called First Look, which is ... Yeah, usually an artist on the occasion of their first inclusion in a museum show at this stage. Another writer who lives in Chicago where Liza lives profiled her for our column in September, which was great. Yeah, I'm blanking on who else. I wrote about Constantina Zavitsanos and the captions essay with [Amala Jablan 00:34:32], but they recently had another show that pushed some of these ideas further. It was really amazing. Let's see, how do I ... A lot of their work deals with debt and dependency in terms of both money and disability and whatever else, so part of their show were dice and gambling. You can roll the dice and get a bunch of money, or not. They made holograms of them, the idea being that holograms, if you cut them in half you get two images instead of one, and the idea is, we think of sharing and interdependency as giving something away and therefore having less, but it doesn't always work like that.

Emily Watlington:

Similarly, in 2015 at the New Museum they had been illegally arrested in the Iraq War protests at the Republican national convention, and the city of New York paid out I don't know how much money, but a lot of money to the people that had been arrested, and they just decided, this is city money, I'm going to give it all away. So every day in the summer of 2015 they just left a Visa gift card at the New Museum on this really strange addition to their admissions desk that's supposed to make it accessible, but really the desk is three or four inches too high to be ADA compliant, and so they just made this drawer that sticks out that is really a silly workaround. Yeah, anyone could just take that money and spend it however they want, to go to the museum, to get a coffee. A lot of people got gas with it.

Emily Watlington:

Okay, in their newer show they had a monologue talking about these ideas, but it was played under the floor and pitched really low. I think five Hz. I don't know if I'm saying the technical stuff about sound, but basically you experienced it as a vibration rather than hearing it, the idea being that everyone would have the same experience of this soundtrack that was then captioned.

Aimi:

Oh, wow.

Emily Watlington:

You definitely run into this attitude all the time which is like, oh, if I make something accessible then I'll have less of whatever resource left for myself.

Aimi:

Yeah, so it's speaking back to ideas about access and scarcity.

Emily Watlington:

Totally.

Aimi:

Anything else exciting that's coming up in the work that you're doing in your new job?

Emily Watlington:

Good question. We're thinking about how image descriptions factor into what we do. In addition to alt-text, we've always been writing our pieces as if they person reading it isn't going to see the show, so trying to embed description into the text itself as well as the alt-text field. I'm writing right now about how various museums are approaching these things. The MCA Chicago has a really amazing website for image descriptions for artworks, and you can actually on the left side of the sidebar click a button that says "image descriptions on." Usually they're hidden away in the alt-text field and you don't see them unless you're accessing them by a screen reader or have some sort of plugin, but this just turns them on so you experience the whole website like that.

Aimi:

Oh, wow.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, and they have a show by an arts named Mika Rottenberg right now, who's a video artist, and they have versions of all her videos online that you can watch with visual descriptions and closed captions from your home, which I think is a really important gesture.

Aimi:

That's really cool. Do you know anything about who developed this?

Emily Watlington:

I do. There's an access consulting group that they collaborated with, whose name is escaping me, but I can send you the name.

Aimi:

Okay, yeah, great. I think it's also good for people to know that there are access consultant groups that they can work with and don't have to reinvent the wheel with all of these things. Museums are ... You mentioned before that there are still differential norms around the quality of access around digital media and around image descriptions and captions and stuff, and museums are a place where there's so much experimentation around these things because they deal with media more than some other kind of institution. It's always really interesting to me to see what people are coming up with.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, that's a great point. At the same time, though, I have a piece coming out in Future Interior about how video art has, because it's in the museum, has inherited preservation standards from painting, and so a lot of times people won't add closed captions because it's altering the original aesthetic experience, even though videos don't have the original in the same way that a painting does. So yeah, there's these two tensions that are still being worked out.

Aimi:

Do you mean with archival footage and stuff like that? Or other kinds of video?

Emily Watlington:

A video made by an artist that is in a museum collection.

Aimi:

Oh, okay, gotcha.

Emily Watlington:

If you read their writing at the time of, say around the '70s, they're all about radical access, which means something different, which is like getting outside of the museum.

Aimi:

Then for a museum to show that work and to add captions onto it would be thought of as the equivalent of writing on a painting or something like that.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, right.

Aimi:

Yeah.

Emily Watlington:

One other thing I wanted to add about the access consulting groups, I've talked to quite a few disabled artists who find that they're invited to give inspirational talks or basically do consulting works a lot more than they are to be artists and show artworks, which is important work and isn't a bad thing, but ... Yeah, I don't know, it's interesting the kind of labor that people expect from disabled people.

Aimi:

Yeah, absolutely, and the kinds of labor that have easy funding streams attached to them as well.

Emily Watlington:

Totally.

Aimi:

In that way that consulting can become a day job sort of thing that supports other kinds of work.

Emily Watlington:

Totally.

Aimi:

Yeah, and there's the complication too, and this comes up in architecture, which I'm sure you know, that there are access experts but their knowledge base is not always access centered or disability justice centered.

Emily Watlington:

It's like, how to not get sued, here's the code.

Aimi:

Yeah, exactly. There are plenty of firms that have ADA compliance experts and that kind of thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are staffed by disabled people or people who are thinking critically about accessibility and stuff. But in that way that you're just saying, unless disabled people are making a choice to become access experts, there is often this expectation or burden that ...

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, totally. I hope they're getting paid a consultant's rate and not an artist's rate to do that work.

Aimi:

Yes, oh, great point too. That's an important thing for people to know, if anyone is listening to this podcast or reading the transcript and is like, I'm going to reach out to Shannon Finnegan and set up a workshop, you should pay that person the consultant rate and not the artist rate, even though the workshop is both a work of art and a type of activism.

Emily Watlington:

Definitely.

Aimi:

Yeah. Great. I have one last question, about ... We've had a lot of disabled artists and people working the intersection of disability arts and culture and design on the podcast this season. What are some of the future directions that you see for disability arts?

Emily Watlington:

Yeah. That's a good question. I really do think that there's going to be a lot more of rethinking "audiovisual media" to center other senses. The Constantina Zavitzanos sort of vibrating floor sound I was talking about, I think that happened in September, and Tina is the one doing the voice over on Carolyn's Recipe for Disaster video. Yeah, I think there should and there's going to be a lot more rethinking how to make video and "audiovisual media" accessible from the fabric of the original rather than through all these add ons after the fact.

Aimi:

Yeah, yeah, great. That's very exciting. It's also a good nod towards some of the work that we're doing in the lab going forward with the podcast too, really asking why does a podcast have to be primarily an audio format, and what would it mean to start with other types of sensory inputs and call that a podcast too?

Emily Watlington:

Cool. Can't wait to see, or experience.

Aimi:

Yeah, totally. Well thank you so much, Emily. This has been wonderful.

Emily Watlington:

Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me. It's always great to chat.

Introducing Crip Ritual:

All cultures have rituals. Rituals can be ways to change material circumstances, politics, lived experience, or even spiritual realities. So rituals are a method for designing a better world. In disability culture, we often use rituals as ways of designing and anticipating a more accessible future. What role does ritual play in your life, and what rituals could you imagine designing to ensure a better future for you and other members of disability culture and community? The Critical Design Lab invites submissions to an art exhibition called Crip Ritual, which will be on display in Spring 2021. You can submit your artworks to the exhibition for consideration via our website, www.cripritual.com, or participate on social media using #cripritual.

Outro:

You’ve been listening to Contra*: a podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. Contra* is a production of the Critical Design Lab. Learn more about our projects at mapping-access.com., and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

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Episode 2.5: Emily Watlington- Show Notes and Transcript

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Introducing Crip Ritual:

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