*ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 5 DECEMBER*

CALL FOR PAPERS: CRIPTECH AND THE ART OF ACCESS

We invite submissions to a peer-reviewed special issue of Leonardo journal titled, “CripTech and the Art of Access” dedicated to exploring the intersection of art, technology, science, disability, and access. This issue will expand existing scholarship, activism, art, and design practice that centers “aesthetic access” as an animating principle of art, science, and technology to showcase crip innovation and creativity. The issue seeks to document and theorize the work of Leonardo’s CripTech Incubator artists, as well as to chart the emerging field and praxis of CripTech Art. 

Crip Technoscience, or CripTech for short, takes root in crip theory, a field of research invested in re-centering the skills and knowledge disabled people cultivate to remake inaccessible worlds. In recent years, scholars, activists, and arts practitioners have demonstrated the power of “aesthetic access” or “creative access” in museums, curated exhibitions, and arts spaces, reimagining what access can be when it transcends basic accommodation or regulatory compliance. From participatory audio description that offers multiple renditions of a single work, to poetic reinterpretations of captions and access doulas for remote gatherings, there has been an exciting paradigm shift that translates to new sensory possibilities for how visitors can engage with the arts. Despite their multimodal capacities, many media and science-based art and art-making tools such as VR, AR, digital games, and biotechnology remain inaccessible and have yet to benefit from this critical attention. 

This collection will draw together emerging scholarship in crip technoscience with artistic practices that expand the creative horizon of accessibility. It asks: What does it mean to crip art, science, and technology knowledge and praxis? How can we build in access as a creative or design principle in digital art and art-making tools? What new creative or embodied possibilities for creating, producing, experiencing media and science-based or tech-enabled art might emerge from disabled artists’ knowledge and practices? What new frameworks emerge for art, science, and technology when we center access institutionally? 

We are interested in approaches that are informed by intersectional histories of ability, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status.

Possible themes or topics may include:

• Artworks and/or art practices that “crip” media art through user-centered design
• The deployment and reimagination of access tools/strategies like captioning, ASL, and audio description in multimodal art and technology platforms like AI, AR, and VR
• Ephemera, stories, and reflections that showcase the frictions artists encounter in their processes, especially as they relate to tech-based art-making tools, processes, and systems
• Creative apps or approaches that hack existing platforms, networks, or devices to generate new forms of access or artistry
• Haptics, tactile tools, and modes of engagement
• Robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithmic culture
• Disability Studies and Science and Technology Studies
• Crip Digital Media - games, AR, VR, AI, online communities, volumetric film, motion capture, or synthetic media 
• Archives, databases, online exhibitions, and remote arts access
• Crip futurities
• Disability and Indigenous technologies
• Disability and Access aesthetics in media art 
• Ecologies, environments, living systems, intra-species relations, and disability
• Crip citizen science
• Crip time and dismantling capitalist frameworks of productivity/engagement
• Drugs and/or pharmaceuticals
• Crip community care networks; Indigenous healing arts and medicine 
• Bioart, organisms, life processes, and genetic engineering
• Cyborgs, prosthetics, posthumanism 
• Chronic illness, disease, impairment, madness, Deafness, neurodiversity, and other crip ways of being that shape engagements with art and technology

Proposals and Inquiries

To be considered for inclusion in this special publication, please send a title, abstract (100–250 words) and short bio (max. 200 words) to editor@leonardo.info with "CripTech proposal: [your title]" in the subject line by 5 December 2022. Selected authors will be notified by 5 January 2023 and invited to submit fully developed pieces to Leonardo by 30 April 2023. Selected submissions will be published pending peer review in Fall 2023.

Manuscript Submissions

We invite several kinds of contributions that relate to the special issue theme, including:

• General articles (1500–5000 words): may include theoretical or critical writing on the special issue’s subject, such as history, critical theory, arts practice, activism, politics, and education.  
• Technical Articles or Illustrated artists’ articles/notes (1500–5000 words): discusses specialized technical topics such as new materials or application of new technologies; or analyzes current work or body of work from either the artist’s perspective and/or that of an interlocutor/collaborator/researcher, or as a co-authored piece. 
• Statements: short writings that disseminate key new results, ideas, and developments in practice, including curatorial statements (1–2 pages, up to 2000 words) 
• Artist statements (200 words) with 1–3 images 
• Interviews: writing in the 1–3 page statement format 
• Speculative or experimental writing/projects  (600–3500 words)
• Multimedia supplements: additional materials or experimental works to be included as online supplements to contributions (max. of 3 files up to 100MB)

Interdisciplinary research, experimental contributions, and co-authored papers are particularly welcome. For detailed instructions for manuscript and art preparation, visit Information for Journal Authors.