Reading Group Session 2 - Hosting notes for JT and FdE only

Writing together: Access-led (de)scripting

• Make sure all can chat
  
• Make sure captions on
  
• Make sure recording on if needed

• Jacquie gives acknowledgement, brief intro to program, hand over to ALL
  
• Jon shares access approach for the meeting
  - Tallara has offered to be our access attendant today – Zoom DM
  - Reiterating the access requests. We have been asked to provide captions, which you should now be able to access through the Zoom menu. We also received requests for a transcript of this discussion, which we will produce by saving the auto-generated captions. Please let Fayen and I or Tallara know if you have any issues with this, and we will follow up with you. Consent to share.
• Jon introduces the theme of language and text which we are setting up and unpacking in this session.
• Jon shares some moments from the previous reading group’s RiseUp Pad discussion.
  
  Some contributors remarked on the empowering concept of Open Access as a radical — root-level — change, and wondered how to carry that shift from people with marginalised political identities into spaces led by ‘able-bodied, non-mad, white cultured’ people, like universities. What can be done, one asked, without having the leverage to shift the larger conditions of institutions?
  
  The conversation there continued to address Carmen Papalia’s self-description as a ‘non-visual learner’, and the particular openings that the choice of this word suggested. Not just for how we might position ourselves generally, but how it gestures towards the conditions in which knowledges are re-created, rather than passively inherited or received.
  
  Several people agreed with acknowledging the restrictions of the contexts they work in (as artsworkers and artists), while becoming awake to simple ways of smuggling creative access into their work. They might be as simple as hanging heights, or furniture designed to instigate encounters between people.
  
  There were some considered expressions of collective-ness and individual-ness, or collective-ness and temporary-ness. How can we hold space for change and response alongside continuity and ritual?
  
  Finally, there was discussion of communication about or through access earlier in the process of making works or shows. Frustration with how teams work separately, and how ultimately artists are cut out of direct engagement with audiences; how this may happen early in the process, for sure, but also how artists’ engagement through access could extend beyond the opening of a show too …
  
  

• Fayen presents summary of ‘Chronic Illness, Slowness, and the Time of Writing’ by Mel Chen
  
In 2012, Mel Chen published their first book Animacies. In a chapter that Mel Chen wrote for the edited volume Crip Authorship, they begin by reflecting on criticisms of Animacies as a difficult, theoretical text.

Mel Chen then shares that the book “was written in the brain fogginess of my most marked period of immersive illness.” It was written from the sensory, cognitive, and emotional space in which Mel Chen was living at the time. They explained it like this: “the phrases that came out were the only way for me to imagine.”

Mel Chen felt some shame at first that the words that came out would be difficult, and not accessible to a wide audience.

A friend encouraged Mel Chen to write a new book that would turn Animacies into a plain language publication. This prompted Mel Chen to consider the ways that plain language or Easy English is a standardised, and still-colonising language. They argue that plain language has weaponised ‘clarity’ in English, while marginalising other languages and dialects and forms of speaking and knowing.

Mel Chen says “Asserting the dominance of plain language… in access contexts, in the name of access, is a lot more racialized and nationalistic than the modest image of its presentation.”

I did not read their argument as an outright dismissal of plain language - indeed, Mel Chen shares that sometimes they too have been relieved by the clarity of plain language.

Instead, I read Mel Chen’s text as a plea to welcome the abundant forms of expression that come from chronic illness, or other disabled or crippled states of being.

There is a paragraph in Mel Chen’s chapter which is also repeated in a separate chapter of the Crip Authorship book, by Alison Kafer. Mel Chen and Alison Kafer coauthored their shared paragraph - and coauthoring is its subject as well as its form.

Just as access calls us to travel together, to share political space together, Mel Chen and Alison Kafer commend co-authoring as a crip mode of making that allows us to hold space for one another, to wait for one another. and to accommodate ebbs and flows in energy, in fatigue, in pain, in capacity. 

They also propose that we be creative about the challenge that co-authoring makes to ideas of intellectual ownership - to welcome a kind of “cripping off” instead of “ripping off”.


• Jon presents summary of ‘Inventions in sound’ by Raymond Antrobus and Eleanor McDowall (and shares 51 second excerpt)
  
  Our next text is a 28 minute captioned radio documentary. It was commissioned by BBC Radio 4. It’s by Deaf British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus and British radiomaker Eleanor McDowall; it was made as a companion piece to Raymond’s book All the Names Given. When it came out in 2021, it won awards, and exposed many radio industry people to the idea of creative captioning and d/Deaf perspectives.
  
  It’s hosted by Raymond, and features a couple of key guests:
  - Poet Meg Day
  - Sound artist Christine Sun Kim
  - Captioner and trainer Calum Davidson
  
  Meg and Christine are both Deaf. In the documentary, they speculate about the nature of sound. With Raymond, they share a fascination with how sound works — how it is more than what is heard, and how the idea of it sometimes exceeds what can be heard. Meg describes it as ‘a kind of mythology’. She says it’s ‘one way for experiences to touch’. Christine asks, ‘Does sound itself have to be a sound? Could it be a feeling, emotion or an object? Could time itself become a sound?’
  
  Watching TV and films as a child, Raymond talks about filling in the gaps for what he could not hear. Revisiting these programmes, he recalls thinking ‘this whole other thing happens, this whole other universe, and it’s … just actually pretty straightforward.’
  
  As he explains the process of captioning programmes for his job, Calum says that he tries to ‘remove as much subjectivity as possible’. He talks about carefully sequencing captions so they don’t give the game away or ruin the plot. He talks about splitting the questions and answers in quiz shows and comedy shows. These are things they get a lot of feedback about if they get it wrong. He describes the careful decisions a captioner has to make about transcribing messy dialogue; how closely to transcribe people depending on context. And he says the best outcome is an objective, fact-based and brief caption.
  
  Christine talks about how she’d like to be able to choose the level of detail in her captions sometimes, or to choose who’s doing the captions. Meg agrees that she has favourite interpreters. Lindsey Dryden, a filmmaker and an inclusion advocate, speaks briefly about the importance of integrated access.
  
  Finally, Raymond talks to Meg and Christine about their relationships with radio and their hopes for more tactile, physical sound devices that can hint at vibrational, inter-sensory experiences. Both of them reflect on the fact that it’s not their voices we’re hearing in the documentary, but the voices of their interpreters, and they talk about the importance of those relationships. Meg talks about the ‘evidence of access’ that is a form of visibility for Deaf people. Raymond talks about his newer inconspicuous hearing aids, and how these have made his deafness more obscure to hearing people. Christine describes ‘hearing people anxiety’ or HPA, and the exhausting accommodations she makes in order to communicate with hearing people.
  
  The piece ends on a poetic note, heavily interspersed with Raymond’s poetic captions. He speaks of synaesthesia, of transformation and interplay between senses. New inventions of the creative mind.
  
  
  
• Fayen presents summary of ‘Crip Making’ by Aimi Hamraie
  
  During the early months of the Covid pandemic, many non-disabled people were scrambling to adapt to remote ways of working and interacting.
  
  Disability communities already had expertise and experience in systems and technologies to support remote access and remote activism.
  
  Aime Hamraie points to long histories within disability communities of making and remaking, designing and redesigning technologies and systems to support their own participation, and resist exclusion and isolation.
  
  As Covid broke out, and lockdowns began, disabled artists and activists began to organise online.  
  
  Some formed digital mutual aid networks to organise the distribution of food and medicine and masks and air sanitisers. Others launched online campaigns to bring attention to the ways disabled people were being denied urgent care, despite being at greater risk from Covid.
  
  Many began to offer online cultural events. Within their chapter ‘Crip-making’, Aime Hamraie provides a detailed account of one of these events, ‘Remote Access: A Crip Nightlife Party’.  Aime writes: “We wanted to show what disabled communities ­ were already ­doing with remote and digital forms of participation, as well as to create a space for our communities to share movement, cele­bration, and kinship in the midst of grief.”
  
  I should note too that disabled communities also have experience in over-use of technology, including zoom fatigue. Disabled cultural events modelled access not only in terms of online engagement, but also care protocols that encouraged people to turn off cameras, to move away from the screen, to shape forms of participation that allow for rest.
  
  Aime Hamraie offers this event as an example of iterative crip-making, a design process that is po­litical in that it gathers networks of kinship and belonging around disabled world-­building practices, in ways that challenge mainstream cultural norms and values.
  
  Aime continues:
  
  “Muting my computer, I took my role as the live image describer by speaking into my phone. For the next hour, I described visual content while I danced along to the ­ music and waved at my friends on the screen. When my shift was over, another participant took over. Many other participants did the same work via text in the chat box.”
  
  “..[P]artygoers wore outfits covered in glitter and sequins and swayed their bodies to slow tunes. A chatbox next to the images offered descriptions of the mood and speed of the ­music. Lyr­ics and spoken language ­were transcribed in on-­screen captioning. An ASL interpreter signed the lyr­ics and other words. A team of volunteers worked as “access doulas” in the chat section, sparking conversation, describing sounds, naming the songs, and making fun party banter.”
  
  Alongside the DJ set, disabled artists screenshared works. For example, Taiwanese American disabled artist Yo- Yo Lin screenshared work studying body movements and joints popping—­ a computerized image of a body moving in space, surrounded by orbs of neon light.
  
  I chose this text as a supplementary reading for the week, because I read the Crip Nightlife Party as a rich example of many forms of communication threading and layering, and I appreciated the text as a detailed, pragmatic account of how and why different access strategies were included. I hoped that it might provide food for thought about how performances, sound works, video works, and public programs are presented within your museum or gallery or art space.
  

• Jon invites anyone who participated via the rest prompt to summarise thoughts that came up for them.

• Invite wider group to share thoughts or questions that came up while they were reading.
• Invite them to share brief reflections in the chat, or if they wish, longer reflections in our shared writing space, which will also be available after the session, throughout the weeks of the reading group.
• Discussion prompts:
  ‘Are there forms or methods of reading or writing or translating that you wish could be more present in the museum?’
  ‘Thinking about language as community, which/who give you a sense of connection and belonging?’  
  ‘Thinking of access and ‘crip time’, how might different experiences of time shape new approaches to writing or reading texts in the museum?’
• Intermittently summarise any themes emerging in the chat.
• Invite elaboration of points from some of the participants who shared thoughts.

• Beginning with a simple collective captioning exercise using the Zoom chat … ‘Portrait ii’ (excerpt, 2m50s) by Primitive Motion (Sandra Selig and Leighton Craig)
  
• Discuss time and language, potentially reflecting on Mel Chen’s essay
  
• Listen and caption one more time?
  
• Discuss: Questions of perspective and authorship, role-playing and role-making
• Play and caption second piece: ‘tri diamond 15 crystal umbil ballit’ by Dylan Martorell (2m19s)
  

• Fayen introduces Joseph Rizzo Naudi and DesCript. 
  
  Joseph Rizzo Naudi is a blind writer based in London, currently working on a phd that involves writing a novel as an image description.
  
  Joseph also runs DesCript, a blindness-led collective which has hosted participatory workshops in galleries and museums throughout the UK. DesCript approaches artwork description as an experimental and collaborative creative practice and literary form. Through these workshops, participants are encouraged to draw on their varied sensory, biographical and place-based perspectives to co-author descriptions of artworks. 
  
  Joe frames these descriptions as new language-based artworks, that may be shared live, vocally, or through audio-descriptive sound works and captioned videos.
  
  One of Joe’s methods plays with visual vs non-visual beholding, and this is the method we will try together today. 
• Jon leads the image description exercise — Madonna Staunton, Tell Us Who We Are (Professor Perry Bartlett), 2014

• To quote from Karen Emmerich, in Literary Translation and the Making of Originals:
  
  ‘… translation doesn’t move an invariant semantic content across linguistic divides, like a freight train carrying a cargo of meaning to be unloaded on the far side of some clearly demarcated border. Rather, as Naoki Sakai (or Sakai Naoki) writes, translation seeks to “create continuity at the elusive point of discontinuity” between languages whose boundaries are themselves unstable. Translation continues the iterative growth of a work in another language whose otherness and self-sameness are always provisional. Translation requires a complex set of interpretive decisions that are conditioned by the particular context in which a translator (or translators) is working. At least as regards the words and punctuation that comprise them, translations are radically different from the prior texts on which they are based. But the creation of difference is not synonymous with change. Translations are textual supplements; for most readers, they serve as substitutes for something written in a language they cannot access. Translators use one or more texts for a work as the basis from which to formulate another text in another language. They decide what a work means (to them), how it means (to them), and which of its features (diction, syntax, linguistic register, rhythm, sound patterning, visual or material aspects, typographic form, and so on) are most important for the particular embodied interpretation they hope to share with others. They also decide how to account for those features in the new text they are writing. Even more basically, translators often decide—if sometimes unwittingly—what the “original” or the “source text” is, or at least what their original or source text will be.’
  
  
• When we are thinking about the relationship between one sensory experience and its transfer to another, we might invoke notions of transcribing, translating or scoring (see Dylan Martorell’s graphic score for the sound piece we captioned a moment ago)
• How might a described or transcribed sound form the basis of a new text – a script, a story, a question, a poem? And how about within a gallery or museum context?
  
• How could intersensory translations and descriptions form part of the archiving practises of institutions dealing with works that will inevitably physically deteriorate?
  
  

• Closing remarks — next session, consent for transcript and captions, access to RiseUp Pad
• Workshop enrolments have closed; show slide for performance