Image description: The letters E.A.A.T. are outlined in blue aside from the second A, representing Access, which is filled in with a bold blue. Under the acronym are the words Experiments in Art, Access & Technology. This text is underlined by sound waves of varying amplitude. Tinged in blue and orange, the waves reverberate and fade into the black background.

EXPERIMENTS IN ART, ACCESS & TECHNOLOGY EXHIBITION
𝗗𝗔𝗧𝗘: 30 September 2023–13 January 2024
𝗪𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘: Beall Center for Art + Technology, U.C. Irvine

Leonardo/ISAST presents Experiments in Art, Access & Technology - or E.A.A.T. This exhibition premieres new work by emerging and established artists Meesh Fradkin, Carmen Papalia, Josephine Sales, Andy Slater, and Olivia Ting developed in Leonardo CripTech Incubator, an art and technology fellowship for disability innovation. Organized by curators Vanessa Chang and Lindsey D. Felt, with support from program curator Claudia Alick, E.A.A.T. will be on view at the Beall Center for Art and Technology from 30 September 2023 through 13 January 2024. 

Experiments in Art, Access & Technology, or E.A.A.T. chronicles the emergence of access as an animating principle of art, science, and technology. From participatory audio description to captions that evoke poetry, access is being reimagined as an expressive form that catalyzes new sensory possibilities for artistic experience. Despite their multimodal capacities, many media art tools remain inaccessible and have yet to benefit from this creative attention. E.A.A.T. introduces methods in art and technology that embody lived experiences of disability. 

Invoking the field’s ethos of experimentation and collaboration, E.A.A.T. prototypes a new program that links communities, institutions, and ways of knowing through creative access. This paradigm marks a turning point in the history of the art and technology movement. In the 1960s, Leonardo, E.A.T. or Experiments in Art and Technology and LACMA’s Art and Technology Program created infrastructure for artists, scientists and engineers to share knowledge. Emboldened by such platforms, artists redefined the social impact of new technologies.

E.A.A.T. artists test the limits and affordances of media and machines, drawing attention to ableist values of functionality, usage, and navigation such devices encode. Listening to conversations in the gallery, Meesh Fradkin's voice-activated sculpture, babbel, invites visitors to consider how words are hollowed out by use, overuse, or misuse. Carmen Papalia’s Pain Pals is an incubator for project development, creative practices and community resources that center care and approach pain as a generative experience. Embodying blind modalities of being, Andy Slater’s Unseen Sound uses spatial audio and real-time sonic descriptive text as a wayfinding tool to remap lived experiences of real and virtual space. Josephine Sales’ Total Running Time illuminates the often-hidden interconnections between disability, extraction, the production of deviancy, and how this shapes our orientation to time. In Song Without Words, an immersive multi-channel projection, Olivia Ting renders the gestural continuities between piano, musical conducting and sign language to redefine the phenomenological experience of listening.

These installations foster dialogue and exploration, bringing transparency to often opaque black box systems. E.A.A.T. artists guide us through uncharted and often challenging forms of access that echo the capricious demands of technology. Opening prismatic entry points into multisensory aesthetic experiences, they prompt critical reflection on artistic spaces and for whom they are made. E.A.A.T. artists deploy access as a expressive form, a liberatory tool, and an experiential technology for sustaining community. 

E.A.A.T. emerges from a broader program under Leonardo CripTech Incubator. Comprising the inaugural cohort, artists Fradkin, Papalia, Sales, Slater and Ting developed their projects in four residencies across California, from the Beall Center for Art and Technology and Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science and Technology (SBCAST), to the RadMad Disability Lab at UC Berkeley and Thoughtworks Arts, which closed in 2023. 

Drawing on Leonardo’s global network of art, science and technology practitioners, CripTech Incubator remakes the entire design cycle through access. Beyond their residencies and the E.A.A.T. exhibition, fellows will publish reflections in Leonardo journal. A first-of-its-kind program in the field, the fellowship understands access as an institutional practice. 

𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗡 𝗠𝗢𝗥𝗘 : https://buff.ly/3R1x3oE 
Exhibiting artists premiere new work developed in Leonardo CripTech Incubator, an art and technology fellowship for disability innovation.