Access Magicians in Cyberspace: Care as a Festive Practice

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, institutions are making great efforts to transition to online forms of connecting and engaging—a rush to innovate which lands both painfully and ironically for disabled folks who have long advocated for these very ways of providing access. It’s a moment where institutions have an opportunity to learn about access from the disabled creatives who have pioneered ways of connecting that overcome physical and social barriers. Access is a way of sharing space, a social practice which enlivens the blandly pragmatic dimensions of the new online spaces now being developed for remote work and school applications. A singularly innovative project that applies access as both practice and medium is Remote Access, an ongoing project developed by The Critical Design Lab (a multi-disciplinary and multi-institution arts and design collaborative rooted in disability culture). Remote Access reimagines accessible nightlife through collaborative online environments and access practices and completely re-constructs the online portal as a space that is both liberatory and celebratory, and most importantly—accessible to all. My conversation here with Remote Access artists Kevin Gotkin (Critical Design Lab) and Yo-Yo Lin (Culture Hub) considers the project through the lens of its companion idea, Access Magic.

— Proceed as if the revolution has already happened —

“Orienting ourselves toward access is not prefatory. It’s not a delay. It’s not something we set at the beginning and move on from. It’s the way we make space. It’s the way we work together.”¹

“This is a disability-centric party space. We recognize and center those who know most about the systems that affect our lives: queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, disabled people of color. Please be mindful of the space you are creating.”²

—Performing the practice—

Lisa Prentice: Zooming into the Remote Access: Witches N Glitches space, it felt like entering another dimension of possibility around care and support, it was such an amazing experience of a relational access in practice that enlivened an entire public space, with the eager participation of everyone present. I felt the freedom to just enjoy myself without feeling any burden of anxious care and concern either for myself or anyone else who was there, because I felt so secure that folks were well supported. I simply don’t experience that freedom from anxiety very often in social environments.

Mia Mingus’ essay on Access Intimacy³ and her careful articulation of the relational, emotional, and social dimensions of access has changed my way of thinking about what access is or could be, yet that degree of care often feels out of reach. I was so excited by Witches N Glitches’ offering of “Access Magic,” because of the way the word magic immediately suggests the emotional and joyful dimensions of access practice to me. Building capacity and collective responsibility for creating and engaging space with care and intention feels aligned too with an idea of magic. I also love that magic suggests the possibility of the transformation of material conditions in an instant. It pushes the idea of “access” completely out of the sphere of retrofits and adaptation.

Kevin, could you tell me a little bit more about your vision of Access Magic? What is it, how do we share it?”

Kevin Gotkin: i am really moved by your description of your experience at REMOTE ACCESS. you capture exactly the feeling i hope these spaces create: the proliferation of access intimacies, the feeling of being supported in whatever access needs arise.

i like framing access as magic because it feels like the opposite of regulatory compliance, which is such a dominant way of conceptualizing accessibility. even seemingly declarative language around access, like the word “accommodation,” is constraining what is truly possible when we think of the artful dimensions of access. so access magic is the stuff that you can only do with others, only with the specific forms of collaboration we discover at the parties. it is knowing and doing more than any individual can do.

it also names a relationship between the glitch and access. in the script for the “glitchual” piece yo-yo and i worked on for the witches n glitches party, i named how, in the apocryphal use history of the word “glitch,” some believe it originated as an acronym: gremlins loose in the computer hub/hardware. and gremlin derives from an older english word “gremian,” to vex. this feels like how we talk about and experience glitches as some haunting of the machines. but is it always dreadful? what if the vexing was an exorcism of ableism, an embrace of the weird and wily realms that open when we think about the emergent aesthetics of lags, stutters, and errors? access magic as a specifically digital spell-casting seems to build a new tradition of vitality within the networks of machines and users we are convening in our parties.

Yo-Yo Lin: I think Access Magic can be many things, and I think that’s what makes it fun for us to figure out what it can mean- personally and with one another. Magic means so many different things for people based on their ideologies, culture and spiritual beliefs. But in many ways magic is also universal. You can find magic all around the world in practically every culture. For me, I think it allows us to practice access with a sense of shared sacredness. Access is not just something you do because you have to, but is something you do with intention, care and a sense of humility. I think when access is done with care, it can create experiences that feel truly magical. I’ve noticed like rituals and spells, access takes time. Both are processes that move at a pace beyond dominant, capitalistic ideas of time, and are always relational.

I think magic allows us to think about ourselves as not the only knowing beings, but as part of a fabric of knowledge, that there are other forms of knowledge and powers at play. There are many unknowns yet that is an inherent part of practicing magic. I think that is also a key part of practicing access. Access is ever-changing and expanding, just as our bodyminds are shifting and transforming over time. The unknown is natural, and that’s inherently a part of access-making.

—Participation and access practices as a spell—

Lisa: When we describe access in terms of Intimacy or Magic I think it foregrounds the relational dimension and helps make access better understood as a practice that is shared between bodies and communities. For many, if not most, able-bodied people, disability is an identity that they imagine (and often insist) is only granted by medical institutions, and of course this is often the case. It seems imagining the possibility of sharing in disability and Access culture through cultural engagement and connection with community can be a big leap for abled folks. What are your thoughts on disabled cultural identit(ies) and how culture acts to support connection across diverse communities?

Yo-Yo: I think what you’ve pointed out about medical institutions granting disability identity is very true. I remember having a conversation with my primary care doctor and telling her I identified as disabled, and she responded, “no, you’re not!”, even after doing all the tests on me showing her I have a genetic disorder and how it affects my daily life and quality of life. I think in this instance, the medical institution did not grant me my disability identity while simultaneously quantified me as limited, which was even more jarring. I often find myself in this liminal space with my multiple identities as a TaiwaneseAmerican disabled and chronically ill femme, and often I find myself needing to forge my own identities. Thankfully I have found community to forge these identities with.

What you’re speaking to is very profound, about identity not being simply institutionally defined but also developed in relationship and engagement with culture. I think access can be understood as a universal practice when we think about access not just in terms of how it is legally outlined in the ADA or institutions, but access as all around us.

Access is intersectional, just like our identities. Access can encompass financial access, racial equity, access to citizenship, access to higher education, access to food, access to land etc. Access is not only a disability-related issue, just as many disabled folks are not ONLY disabled, but also BIPOC, queer, with varying socio-economic statuses, immigration statuses etc. I think when we talk about access and invite people into access practice, we need to center these intersectional ideas about access because access includes all of us.

Kevin: this is going to sound really wild as i reflect on my 10 years in disability activism, but: i’m really losing interest in disability as an identity category, especially how it is designed in a monolithic rights-based model of political minoritarianism. just about every week i talk to someone who would not claim disability identity and yet describes to me some fascinating experience of disability: someone i meet for the first time tells me about an undiagnosed food allergy that caused mysterious seizures, i hear post-covid anosmia described in terms of eating popcorn that tastes like little shards of glass, i look at the data about late-stage ph.d. students going through serious forms of anguish and despair.

i am concerned that white disability activism continues to insist on a singular disability identity that can never be truly singular. for many reasons, i am fixated on descriptive practices. so now i want to get right to the description of physical and mental embodiments. i want to meet people as they translate perception and sensation. these dimensions are so much more powerful as the entire world comes to disability. what do we do when “crip time” is an accurate description of global experience and yet totally disavowed by most? i think we attune to the ways we can tessellate outside of the binaries of identity politics as we know it.

—How can access be better understood as a practice
that invites us all to collectively participate?—

Lisa: I’ve been spending time with the definition of a doula offered by the collective “What Would an HIV Doula Do?”⁴ that was included in the Participation Guide for the Remote Access: Witches N Glitches event. Thank you for that introduction, their work is such an amazing resource for supporting access as practice. In their description of what they do they describe a doula as someone who holds space during times of transition, and go on to say, “We doula ourselves, each other, institutions and culture. Foundational to our process is asking questions.” I felt the Access Doulas in the W&G space were an important part of providing access in functional but also relational ways. Could you speak a bit about the role of the Access Doula? What does an Access Doula do?

Kevin: you know, i’ve been thinking a lot lately about how important it is that we study doula history if we are going to talk about being doulas for access. this is work i haven’t done yet. do doulas feel like this term has become a catchall for relational care work? how do we engage a citational practice that anchor the term in the communities where doula practice has been developing?

what draws me to the term is the focus on transition rather than a concept of access provisioning that treats access like a material commodity, offered and taken. but i want the REMOTE ACCESS doula network to determine this work for ourselves. in 2015 and 2016, i helped with security and safety at black lives matter actions in nashville, tn. we would meet up before an action, talk about what we think we would do in various scenarios. it was an interrogative and collectively-designed framework, the kind of organizing that models the opposite of militarized police operations. i’m keen on replicating this kind of organizing, starting with the access needs of the doulas, divining techniques and strategies from our experiences and intuitions.

Yo-Yo: The role of the Access Doula can be many things depending on the person doula-ing. I think for me, Access Doulas are folks who can be present in the space and aware of needs as they arise. I think that is the trickiest part, where folks can tell us their needs ahead of time, but no one really KNOWS how they would feel in a space until they are actually in the space. And circumstances change all the time, with our bodyminds, with other folks in the space, with certain environmental factors. I think the Access Doula is someone who understands this fluidity of access-making and is dedicated to ensuring that when needs arise, they are available to listen and be present to try and meet them.

At the parties, Access Doulas shared lush sound descriptions and visual descriptions of the music and performances.

Their descriptions became kind of a communal, conversational document or transcript of the night, as different doulas noticed different aspects to the art at hand. Our Access Doulas are also often volunteers, disabled folks who are in our communities who want to expand on what description can be and include. In some ways, I think through this party series, people have been able to test out different description techniques and methods in a more flexible and creative setting.

—Accessibility as practice in festive context—

Lisa: In discussions of care, especially bureaucratized framings of care, care is sometimes characterized as burdensome, as labor. It’s a striking contrast to me how Access Magic situates access, and by extension care, as having the possibility of being an element of festive practice, we can imagine access as being fun. What are your thoughts here ?

Kevin: i’m really interested in how interdependence is both an ideal and a fact. there is nothing not interdependent in our lives and we can talk about it in order to open our capacity to perceive and grow virtuous cycles of interdependence. so with that frame, care is always happening. in small, often imperceptible ways.

i love the idea of care as festive practice. this is what i love the most about the best nightlife i’ve experienced. there’s the drama, the elegance, and festivity. these are the rituals that organize my world. and they work best when they are anchored in a loving exploration of others’ access needs. how could this not always already be a festive practice?

Lisa Prentice is a former artist and practicing bodyworker who is passionate about health justice and community approaches to access, healing, and repair. They/she experience the world through the twin lenses of neurodivergence and hypermobility. A graduate of ECIAD, they/she lives and works on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh Nations, Vancouver, BC.

Yo-Yo Lin is a Taiwanese-American, interdisciplinary media artist who explores the possibilities of human connection and embodiment in the context of emerging technologies. She uses intelligent projection/lighting, digital and handdrawn animation, interactive objects, and lush sound design to create meditative ‘memoryscapes.’ Her work often examines human perception as a vehicle for self-knowledge and community growth. https://www.yoyolin.com/

Kevin Gotkin’s work combines research, artistry, and activism. He studies forms of endurance and the ritualization of ableism in American culture. His current book project considers the histories of the telethon, danceathon, walkathon, and hackathon in the US. His previous research has been published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Video Ethnography, and Porn Studies. https://kevingotkin.com/

1. Remote Access: Witches N Glitches Participation Guide.
2. Remote Access: Witches N Glitches Participation Guide.
3. Mia Mingus, Access Intimacy: The Missing Link, May 5, 2011. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/.
4. http://hivdoula.work.

This article is published in issue 38.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue