Planting Disabled Futures
(Image Description: Gabrielle Civil hears the crunch of flowers - head leaning back over the park bench in the Huntington Gardens, touching plants)
A Just Tech Fellowship Project, 2024-2026
In the Planting Disabled Futures project, we use live performance approaches and virtual reality (and other) technologies to share energy, liveliness, ongoingness, crip joy and experiences of pain.
In the development of the Virtual Reality (VR) components of the project, we will ask: How can VR allow us to celebrate difference, rather than engage in hyper-mobile fantasies of overcoming and of disembodied life? How can our disabled bodymindspirits develop non-extractive intimacies, in energetic touch, using VR as a tool toward connecting with plants, with the world, even in pain, in climate emergency, in our ongoing COVID world?
Image Description of Header Image above (all images have ALT text and/or image description): A desert plant in bloom: tender but tough green leaves hold multiple elongated flowers: yellow, orange, red, pointing outward like parrot beaks, openings at the end, fleshy, thick. Some of the flowers are stripped of their petals, and the thin bundle of stamen are all that remain. Is this a wound? Is this how the flower prepares its seed?
A watercolor mock-up of the Crip Cave, with moira williams' Stim Tent, two VR stations, a potential sound bed, and a table for drawing/writing.
A cyanotype/watercolor mock-up of what the app may look like: tree-like structures, with portals and choices to go up (into leaves) and down (into the soil)
A cyanotype/watercolor mock-up of the roots with portals and haptic sensation surfaces.
A cyanotype/watercolor mock-up of little critters that might accompany you on your journey through the environment.
Full Project Description
Planting Disabled Futures explores virtual/extended reality (VR/XR) technologies with fellow disabled choreographers/film-makers/dancers, to ask questions about access, community, sensuality, environmental poetics, and the futures of queer/crip play. We will play with VR/XR techniques in community performance settings to create an immersive experience that offers disabled and non-disabled audiences opportunities to move with disabled dance artists and visualizations of future plants, engaging communally in delicious movement rituals. The focus of the project is on enjoyment and enrichment, with collaborative debugging, aesthetic access, and tech/life integration as tools toward the playful immersive community potential of VR/XR.
Even though much progress has been made in the representation of disability and sexuality, disabled people are still rarely seen as agents of sexual creativity or as queer improvisers projecting themselves in new ways into the future. This project engages this ongoing problem by offering registers of tech play, of technologically mediated representations of disability that are not cure-based, but are sassy, affirmative, and pleasurable in interspecies engagements. We will explore environmental queer narratives, engaging unnatural plants, resiliencies and healing pleasure. We will explore a range of performance access techniques, from the integrated aesthetics of audio description and creative captioning to disability culture techniques like storytelling prompts and scores.
How can VR allow us to celebrate difference, rather than engage in hyper-mobile fantasies of overcoming and of disembodied life? How can our disabled bodymindspirits develop non-extractive intimacies, in energetic touch, using VR as a tool toward connecting with plants, with the world, even in pain, in climate emergency, in our ongoing COVID world?
This project aims to comprehend VR/XR’s affordances and their gendered, racialized, classed and ableist histories, to come up with new models, and to imagine them playfully and critically in a just world and in interaction with many different people.
The project is currently using video and meditative encounters in parks and outdoor spaces to explore ways of being, working, breathing together. Below are glimpses of a residency at the Huntington Gardens where Petra and her collaborators engaged each other, plant beings, and the world in delicious performance scores.
(Image Description: Nina Sarnelle lies in a field of green plants and holds a dry Elephant Ear Plant leaf up to their smiling face. Selwa Sweidan is gently touching their back)
This video shares traces of 14 encounters in the Huntington Gardens, where Petra Kuppers was a Visiting Fellow, and where she met with local artists to explore new intimacies among and with generous plant beings.
Planting Disabled Futures at the Huntington Gardens, San Marino, California, May/June 2024
Video description (the video is subtitled and includes short audio descriptions):
Akhila Vimal, holding her blind cane in one hand, moves gently inside a bamboo forest, caressing and engaging with the plants. She audio describes her own movements. A leaf twirls by itself in mid-air over a leaf-strewn ground while kids engage with Petra. Eli Houston energetically engages a tree, hands touching bark. Bonnie Ong moves with a big leaf, tracing small and large movements. The video ends with still images of a diverse set of participants, touching plants, leaves, the ground, in pairs or alone.
(Image Description: Eli Houston holds a palm tree between their palms, the tree's bark is seamed and growth-scared)
Huntington Participants:
Elisabeth Houston
Selwa Sweidan
Nina Sarnelle
Jessica Beckman
Jennifer Scappettone
Joshua Stein
Gabrielle Civil
Ruth Hellier
Syrus Marcus Ware
Akhila Vimal
Jessica King
Robert Hori
Norma Bowles
Bonnie Ong
Touching Bamboo
Smell, touch, taste the leaves, move from stem to stem, find a place for yourself
(Image Description: Akhila Vimal touches bamboo plant leaves in a bamboo forest)
Touching Monstera
Feel the wind, the air, moisture content, your wheels on the soil, the impersonal intimacy of the waxy leaf surface gliding along your fingertips
(Image Description: Bonnie Ong dances with a giant leaves in a lush green world)
Additional Members of the Project Team (in development)
Cynthia Ling Lee is a Taiwanese American interdisciplinary artist who creates embodied art rooted in crip, queer, and feminist of color praxis. She is curious about long-hauling as an alternate embodied training that contradicts dance's ableism, the anti-capitalist wisdom of mosses, the delicate strength of crip care webs, and embodied art that departs from “the show must go on” urgency of theatrical production. Their work has been presented internationally at venues including Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Kuandu Arts Festival (Taipei), and Chandra-Mandapa: Spaces (Chennai). Cynthia is an associate professor of Performance, Play and Design at UC Santa Cruz.
Kym McDaniel (she/her) is an experimental filmmaker, interdisciplinary collaborator, choreographer, curator, and performer. Her films have recently screened in solo and two-person screenings at UnionDocs, Mills Foley Microcinema, Cellular Cinema, Rhizome DC, and the Society for Disability Studies Conference, as well as in group exhibitions at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance, and Superfest Disability Film Festival, among others. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Dance Film and Digital Technologies within the Dance Department at The Ohio State University.
Surabhi Naik (she/her) is a designer and poet based in India. Her creative life has taken an interdisciplinary path across architecture, documentary film, interactive media development and poetry, and is grounded in practices of care and world-building. Naik’s affiliations and collaborations span organizations in New York City, including Culture Push, Works on Water, Equity Design Inc, and Parsons, as well as Alotnesse Studio and Urban Design Research Institute Mumbai. Most recently, she was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and received the Wingword Poetry Prize 2024. Naik earned her MA in Media Studies at The New School in New York City.
moira williams (they/them) is a disabled Indigenous artist, curator, organizer and dreamer weaving together cross-disability justice, gatherings, and arts with Indigenous tech, eco-somatics, and queer ecologies. A lifelong environmentalist, moira’s often co-creative work leads with disability and practices of abundance by imagining “ecological intimacy” as an extension of Mia Mingus’s concept of “access intimacy”. their weavings invite ways towards deepening our ecological relationships and understandings with the land and one another.
Rebecca Caines (she/her) is a Canadian/Australian socially-engaged creative technologies, artist and scholar from York University, Canada. Her experiences with disability in her own life and in her family connect her to the sustaining, innovative, and powerful worlds of disability art, activism, and culture that deeply inform her worldview. She has co-created award-winning large scale community projects in sound art, performance, and digital art, with partners including Indigenous communities, families and support groups, survivors of healthcare injustices, and arts and education networks. She publishes research on art and technology in social justice, contemporary understandings of community, and the fragile promise of ethical connection through improvisation and new ways of listening.
Jason Woodworth-Hou (he/him) is a recent PhD. in Performance Studies with an emphasis on dramatic and new media from the University of Georgia. His research includes exploring digital reenactments of historical events in the geographic spaces where they were purported to occur. He currently lectures for Georgia Institute of Technology, teaching “Shakespeare…technically,” Intro. to Film, and Animation. During his time at Georgia Tech., Jason has been recruiting/training a core of young engineers, programmers, and 3D artists all interested in building virtual environments for uses in storytelling within history, dramatic arts, and film contexts.
(Image Description: A cyanotype (blue) and watercolor mock-up of what the VR app might look like: a violet leaf with sensation hubs, little white ink portals,that might lead to audio dream journeys)
Contact Points for our Project: Join us!
slowly developing from late summer/fall 2024 onward
Promo Reel with Design Brief, invitation for collaborators - students and artists, Fall Semester 2024
MELT/Movement Research week-long hour-per-day engagement, Monday-Friday, July 22 - 26, 2024 | 12-1PM EDT, sliding scale, virtual: Let’s dance with plants – lying down, sitting up, taking space or creeping/jumping off the walls. In this week, we’ll go on dancerly dream journeys and visit with houseplants, street plants, trees we touch and faraway trees, plants on other planets. Who are you, plant being? What wisdom might you care to share? What dances happen where we meet? Going slow, spreading wide and deep, balancing light and dark, sharing resources, and water, water, water. Using movement, writing, a bit of drawing, maybe some sounding, we will explore environmental queer narratives, dance with/as unnatural plants, find resiliencies and healing pleasure.
ATHE/Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Atlanta, Georgia, August 2/3, Botanical Garden, in-person: be in touch to join us for short score encounters
The Planting Disabled Futures Project is supported by the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Fellowship, with funds provided by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Surdna Foundation, and Democracy Fund.