Image credit: Lucia Grossberger Morales, screenshot from the Movement of Squares, 2025

CripTech AI Lab Work-in-Progress Presentations

Date: October 24, 2025

Time: 9 AM - 11 AM PDT 

Where: Zoom (prior registration required)

Please contact criptech@leonardo.info for access accomodations. Please note that this event will be recorded and uploaded for documentation purposes. 

Join us for this showcase of the CripTech AI Lab, where our cohort will debut groundbreaking projects at the intersection of disability, art, and AI. This special event will feature works-in-progress, followed by a discussion with a panel of invited experts –a rare behind-the-scenes look at how these ideas are shaping new possibilities for art, access, and technology. This event is a precursor to a full virtual exhibition of the cohort's work, set to launch towards the end of this year—please stay tuned for more details!

About the CripTech AI Lab

The CripTech AI Lab is a virtual creative incubator that utilizes community-driven digital and new media art projects to engage, critique and reimagine the relationship between disability and artificial intelligence. This virtual lab spans a 4-month period that includes creative, technical and conceptual workshops, guest speakers (scholars, artists, creative technologists), individual project development, and one-on-one project review and advising sessions with the lead artist, culminating in a virtual exhibition, presentation and panel review. Participants will explore themes such as: Algorithms of self-discovery and the creation of personal tools for personal discovery; data ownership; discovery through AI without being mediated through commercial platforms; using open source and indie “tools that don’t try to eat you”.

Lead Artist

CripTech AI Lab is led by artist M Eilo (BlinkPopShift). M Eilo uses castoffs, computers and community to explore disability as a hotbed of innovation. M is best known for their computational prosthetics including Prosthetic Memory, a homemade AI built to offset the artists long term memory loss, and Masking Machine, a wearable computer which automatically masks the artist’s face and simulates eye contact in social interactions. Some of M’s past work include: Prosthetic Memory, AI Acne, Masking Machine, Performance, Masking Machine, Photography Series, Visually Similar

The AI hype train has derailed. We know all about the environmental impacts, the stolen data, and the sheer boring slop. But is it the algorithms? Or is it the billionaires controlling them? And what happens when artists play puppeteer, shaping AI not for growth, not for profit, but for personal agency, creative discovery, and community power? - M Eilo (BlinkPopShift) 

Lab Participants

• Christian Bayerlein/Yesica Duarte/Puneet Jain
• Mat Dalgleish
• Kuo-Ying Lee
• Lucia Grossberger Morales
• Abram Stern
• Zsofi Valyi-Nagy
• Tanya Vlach

Panelists

Lindsey D. Felt

A scholar, writer, curator and educator, Lindsey D. Felt curates and builds frameworks for access/accessibility across digital, arts, and educational platforms. She is the Disability and Access Impact Lead at Leonardo/ISAST, where she serves as an advisor for the CripTech Incubator, an art-and-technology fellowship for disability innovation that she co-founded with Vanessa Chang. She is also an advanced lecturer at Stanford University in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, where she teaches courses on disability, technology, and critical/creative access. She holds a Ph.D in English from Stanford University. Her curatorial work includes Experiments in Art, Access & Technology (E.A.A.T.) at the Beall Center for Art + Technology and Recoding CripTech at SOMArts. her curatorial work has been profiled in Art in America, KQED Arts, SFMOMA's Raw Material podcast, the Disability Visibility Project, and others. Lindsey won a gold medal with the 2005 Deaflympics U.S. Women's Soccer team in Melbourne, Australia, and is currently based in San Francisco.

Catie Cuan

An entrepreneur, engineer, and artist, Dr. Catie Cuan is a pioneer in the nascent field of ‘choreorobotics’ and works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and art.  She is currently building a new company in the robotics space. Catie is the founder and CEO of Zenie, a journal that writes back to you. She holds a PhD and Master’s of Science in robotics and AI from Stanford, where she is also a Postdoc leading the art and robotics efforts at the new Stanford Robotics Center. 

Lauren Lee McCarthy

Lauren McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of automation, surveillance, and algorithmic living. She is a 2024–26 Just Tech Fellow and was the 2022–23 Stanford Human Centered AI Artist in Residence. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA Art+Tech Lab, Sundance, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica, and her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work SOMEONE was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award, and her work LAUREN was awarded the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as the Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, Seoul Museum of Art, Chronus Art Center, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, and the Japan Media Arts Festival.

About Leonardo CripTech Incubator

Leonardo CripTech Incubator is an art and technology program for disability innovation.  Encompassing labs, workshops, fellowships, presentations, publication, and education, this innovation incubator is a community platform for disabled artists to engage and remake creative technologies through the lens of accessibility. Employing a broad understanding of technologies, including prosthetic tools, neural networks, software, and the built environment, CripTech Incubator reimagines enshrined notions of how a body-mind can move, look, communicate.  

About Leonardo

Fearlessly pioneering since 1968, Leonardo serves as THE community forging a transdisciplinary network to convene, research, collaborate, and disseminate best practices at the nexus of arts, science and technology worldwide. Leonardo’ serves a network of transdisciplinary scholars, artists, scientists, technologists and thinkers, who experiment with cutting-edge, new approaches, practices, systems and solutions to tackle the most complex challenges facing humanity today.

As a not-for-profit 501(c)3 enterprising think tank, Leonardo offers a global platform for creative exploration and collaboration reaching tens of thousands of people across 135 countries. Our flagship publication, Leonardo, the world’s leading scholarly journal on transdisciplinary art, anchors a robust publishing partnership with MIT Press; our partnership with ASU infuses educational innovation with digital art and media for lifelong learning; our creative programs span thought-provoking events, exhibits, residencies and fellowships, scholarship and social enterprise ventures.