Slow AI

Curatorial Statement by M Eilo

Audio Tour

"Disability is a portal, a way of focusing our gaze and sharpening our lens on the intricacies of our humanity."

—Alice Wong, 1974-2025

The sun has set. We are wandering along a quiet creek. There are boulders where we can stop to rest. We move slowly. We think and speak slowly. There is no rush.

We built this path with our many hands and mouths and eyes and ears. Our Crip bodyminds are living instruments we “think with rather than about” (Arseli Dokumaci).

We used these instruments to crip our spacetime, finding new routes, new rhythms, new relations. Our methodology (Lateral)? We forgot. We talked in circles. We raged. We lost our way. We repeated ourselves. We misunderstood. We stopped moving forward. We tried things and threw them away. These detours drew new maps in crip time—messy, non-linear cartographies grounded in disability justice.

The landscape we chose—AI—is a tricky one, snarled by hype and hate, desiccated by water theft, and full of rabid data barons with their extraction machines. So we cripped AI. We co–created a community of disabled makers, hackers, artists, musicians, writers, and teachers from 7 different countries who "critiqued, altered, and reinvented" (Hamraie and Fritsch) the algorithm. In this barren landscape, we built resting spots where we can take a break from the rush. 

We thought through AI slowly. We slowed by using techniques like cellular automata dating back to the 1950s—the era that named AI—alongside deep learning and generative AI methods from the 2010s and 20s. We slowed by using open source models that ran locally on own machines instead of in far off data centers. We slowed by authoring algorithms from our own writings, paintings, and even medical data.

Our work was a communal act of deceleration. We weeded out expectations of speed, slowing ourselves and our algorithms down to the irregular, limping pace where conversation, collaboration, and crip culture thrive. Each project, marked by a stone, carries this core into its own medium, culture, and timezone. Together, the stones below form a path for you to follow in your own time. Pause, listen, read. Soak your feet in the stream. Let your stillness shift all our foundations.

We created: