For the second edition of Locating Enter, the team behind this online platform investigates the relationship between access to cultural institutions by people with a (functional) limitation and the design and use of digital tools that can improve this access. In collaboration with Thursday Night Live! the Enter-team will be sharing our three-part web series on Thursday June 30th, July 7th and July 14th.
[sound of subtitles] – Seo Hye Lee
Image description: two hands firmly shape a stone colored clay clod on a slowly rotating wheel subtitles on the left, constructing in the middle sound of worlds colliding on the right soothing music playing.
As a platform, Enter is an experimental site in constant development. Rather than presenting a polished ‘product’, we like to maintain it as a continuous work-in-progress, much like a ‘garden’. Taking influences from the concept of the ‘digital garden’ we aim to cultivate and nourish our online environments as a community and collectively develop a space of evolving ideas. The idea behind the ‘digital garden’ captures the desire for exploratory experiences, a welcoming of digital weirdness, and a healthy amount of resistance to top-down structures.
Taking steps towards this idea and applying these tools and knowledge practically, Enter welcomes you to our series on ‘Digital Care’ with special guest speakers. In this series, we will discuss the relationship between disability access and designing ‘space’. The divisive design of platforms (e.g. profiles defined by numerical values) encourages competition and disregard for one another, but to build through cooperative design could be a way to resist the capitalist guilt of productivity and therefore, create our digital caring commons. This event will be presenting three perspectives on accessibility of digital spaces.
Speakers
Seo Hye Lee is an artist working with sound, illustration, moving image and accessibility to experiment with new forms of narrative, creating playful pieces that challenge the idea of listening. Drawing inspiration from her hearing loss experience, Seo Hye aims to show the difference between hearing and listening; regardless of your hearing skill, one can always listen in a variety of ways. Her work and workshops have been presented physically and virtually in Wysing Arts Centre, Hove Museum & Art Gallery, Grundy Art Gallery, School of Art Institute Chicago, Tate Exchange, LCC, Call and Response Gallery and Vital Capacities.
MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr) study and experiment with shape-shifting processes as they meet technologies, sensory media and pedagogies in a warming world. Meltionary (derived from "dictionary"), is a growing collection of arts-design-research engagements that cooks up questions around material transformations alongside impulses from trans feminism and disability justice. Melting as a kaleidoscope like phenomena touches upon multiple topics at once: climate change, the potential for political reformulations, change over time and material transformation. MELT shares work in the forms of videos, installations, websites, lectures, workshops and courses. MELT was one of last year’s fellows at Het Nieuwe Instituut.
Yin Aiwen is a practicing designer, artist, theorist, strategist and project developer who uses writing, system design and time-based art to examine the social impact of planetary communication technologies. She advocates relationship-focused design as a strategy to redesign, re-engineer and reimagine the relationship between technology and society. Besides publishing and exhibiting internationally, she also works as a strategist and researcher for cultural institutions.