Research

Reframing Access through Art, Architecture and Technology

In progress, KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Accessibility is too often treated as a technical requirement or a matter of regulatory compliance. This project rejects that framing, advancing access instead as a transformative cultural practice that reshapes how space, knowledge, and communication are produced. Persistent barriers in the built environment, digital interfaces, and normative modes of interaction continue to exclude blind and visually impaired people, d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, and neurodivergent individuals from full participation in cultural and intellectual life. Rather than approaching these exclusions as problems to be corrected, the project understands them as critical sites from which new aesthetic, spatial, and technological possibilities can emerge.

Situated at the intersection of disability studies, art, architecture, and technology, the research conceptualizes accessibility as a relational and contested process rather than a stable endpoint. Through close collaboration with disabled artists, designers, and engineers, it mobilizes practices such as alt-text, easy-to-read language, and multisensory engagement as generative tools that reconfigure spatial experience, communication, and design methodologies. Access is positioned not as an afterthought, but as a point of departure for creative and critical inquiry.

By foregrounding accessibility as an ongoing negotiation, the project challenges entrenched hierarchies of design that privilege speed, visual mastery, and autonomous users. It asks how access can expand aesthetic vocabularies, generate alternative forms of spatial knowledge, and foster new modes of belonging across physical and digital environments. In doing so, the project positions accessibility as a critical engine of innovation and a powerful lens through which to rethink the cultural, technological, and architectural conditions of participation.

“Access Codes”: The Politics of Inclusion in Donald Rodney’s Art

In progress, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut

This project reframes ‘access-making’ as a critical, relational practice to explore how disability and race are configured in Donald Rodney’s Autoicon (1997%2000). More than a digital memorial, Autoicon is approached as a speculative interface that reimagines authorship, posthumous presence, and the ways in which access is shaped by both aesthetics and politics. Constructed from Rodney’s medical records, writings, and images, Autoicon o#ers a dispersed digital portrait that resists coherent identity. The project positions it as an early prototype of AI subjectivity, anticipating debates on algorithmic representation and the ethics of digital memory. By examining the intersections of art, disability, and technology, this project rethinks code not as control but as a catalyst for access and aesthetic possibility. Referencing Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-Icon, Donald Rodney replaces the body with a dynamic archive, revealing how disabled artists have long anticipated and reshaped emerging technologies.

CripTech Creativity: Expanding Access

In progress, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut

Anna-Maria Meister, Virginia Marano, and Anna Luise Schubert

Normative ways of seeing and moving through spaces have long dominated discourse in art and architecture history despite their fictitious and exclusionary nature. In architecture practice, accessibility is often treated as a construction checklist or a compliance measure. But what if access were a creative, disruptive, and transformative force? How would places, spaces, and the value of interpersonal relationships change with the embrace of the entire spectrum of experiences and perceptions? Histories of radical disability movements highlight the tension between institutional frameworks and community-driven practices rooted in autonomy and collective worldmaking. At the same time, material innovations such as haptic technologies, sensory mapping, and multisensory environments redefine interactions between bodies and built spaces. By examining these intersections in a context of architecture and art history – disciplines that have long been dedicated to the knowledge residing in perception but also perpetuated their visual and normative primacy – the project opens up new ways of thinking about access, agency, and the politics of space, all under the premise that accessibility is not simply a question of inclusion but a generative process for reimagining the material- discursive world: the project takes the question of access to be a matter of epistemology, not mere accommodation. Barriers in the built environment and communication systems limit access for blind and low-vision people, create obstacles for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, and make navigation challenging for neurodivergent communities. This, however, impoverishes (not least) the scholarly landscape – in research and community. Beyond the urgent inclusion of scholars with di erently-abled bodies, this project poses art history and architecture – with their disciplinary focus on spatial, visual, and sensorial processes and processing – as ideal sites for methodological tests and experiments towards a paradigm shift. This multi-faceted research project invites artistic explorations and interactive workshops; expands our understanding of sensorial and experiential ways of perceiving information and creating knowledge forms; explores online exhibitions as an opportunity to experiment with methods of communicating, translating and accessing visual information. Not least, the project takes its own institutional and spatial context seriously: both by documenting existing and proposing alternative measures, procedures, and architectural elements, but also by conceiving formats precisely by looking from a different perspective at what ‘visual knowledge’ might or might not entail – or become.