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”.

Access Play: AI prosthetics for self augmentation | Artist talk with CripTech AI Lab Lead Artist: M Eilo

Lead Artist

A person with light pink skin and light brown hair in a very silly chipmunk like pose. They are standing in front of a colorful abstract wall mural and wearing large blue glasses, lots of jewelry, and a pink and yellow button-up shirt.
Image credit: Courtesy of Artist

M Eilo

M Eilo uses castoffs, computers and community to explore disability as a hotbed of innovation. As an autistic person who later acquired a brain injury due to corporate greed and negligence they have built and rebuilt their practice around deepening disabled ways of knowing. They build personal prosthetics and community-engaged sculpture, create experimental archives and animated short films, make designed-for-one wearablesand write disabled speculative fiction.


M is best known for their computational prosthetics including Prosthetic Memory, a homemade AI built to offset the artists long term memory loss, Masking Machine, a wearable computer which automatically masks the artists face and simulates eye contact in social interactions, and Invisible Sculpture, an AR and performance piece used to show a monumental scale sculpture to museum visitors…uninvited.


They were recently named a Disability Futures Fellow by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and United States Artists and have been featured at DHMD Museum, BOZAR, Ars Electronica, SomArts, TED, the Exploratorium, SFMoMA (uninvited), the YBCA (uninvited), the Wattis Institute, XOXO, the Armory Show, the Seattle International Film Festival, the Smithsonian Institution and Kennedy Center.

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?

Past Works

Prosthetic Memory
AI Acne
Masking Machine, Performance
Masking Machine, Photography Series
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