blog

2025-04-29

crip musicking reflections cont.

earlier today i was able to present my infrasonic dance music piece during class on a subwoofer, which went better than i expected! it was my first time experiencing the piece as intended(ish) on a proper sub, and although i would've liked to experiment with more diverse rhythms, i think it was an effective proof of concept. it's also worth noting that although the intention was infrasonic, frequencies as high as 90ish hertz were being transmitted, which is considerably more audible than i had hoped. nonetheless, this component of my project has only grown on me as i spent more time with it and i appreciated the reminder that being ambitious/experimental can lead to some interesting discoveries even when the expected result is not reached. my tinkering with infrasonics was quite stresfful at times, but the sense of exploration and play i captured towards the end truly made it all worth it!

i am getting quite passionate about ideas i have for a future independent study tying lots of these threads together, which you can expect more blog posts about in the future. wire sculpture, armatures, homebrew speaker/microphone construction, cripspace, ring splints, homemade mobility aids, etc... are all forming this massive ball of ideas in my head that i can't wait to start expressing through future projects. further exploring sound and disability feels like the exact way i want to spend my time creatively and academically; connecting these concepts is so engaging and cool! i recently supported a peer's independent study hybrid rave + puppet show as one of the DJs (shoutout bogbody!) and attended a one-woman drag show in honor of SOPHIE a friend put on, which have each inspired me greatly. peers creating such wonderful art calls me to do the same! i see a creative path of sorts forming ahead of me that i'm deeply excited to explore. hopefully the art/music/writing/event(s)/etc... i develop along the way continue to feel exciting :) more cool stuff to come hopefully!

2025-04-24

crip musicking: conference reflections

hi! i recently completed my conference work for a class called sound and sexual politics so i wanted to share what went into the paper and accompanying creative component. i elected to write a paper outlining connections between crip technoscience, cripspace, access intimacy, and musicking, particularly within the scope of the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument project begun by Pauline Oliveros and collaborators, as well as Remote Access, a series of disability-centered virtual nightlife events spearheaded by Kevin Gotkin (a.k.a. DJ Who Girl).

Here is my reading list for the project! (Please note that my research for this project extended considerably past the texts referenced in the paper and some titles are film/art/etc...)

• Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice by Mia Mingus
• Access Intimacy: The Missing Link by Mia Mingus
• Aimi Hamraie on "Making Access Critical: Disability, Race, and Gender in Environmental Design" by Aimi Hamraie
• Alt-Text as Poetry Workbook by Bojana Coklyat & Finnegan Shannon
• Artist Christine Sun Kim Rewrites Closed Captions by Christine Sun Kim
• Audio Description Described: Current Standards, Future Innovations, Larger Implications by Georgina Kleege
• Call To Post (Violet) by Constantina Zavitsanos
• Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
• Carried and Held: Getting Good at Being Helped by Park McArthur
• Close Readings by Christine Sun Kim
• Crip Camp (2020)
• Crip Club Vibes: Technologies for New Nightlife by Kevin Gotkin
• Crip Digital Intimacies: The Social Dynamics of Creating Access through Digital Technology by Megan A. Johnson, Eliza Chandler, Chelsea Temple Jones, & Lisa East
• Crip Making by Aimi Hamraie
• Crip Technoscience Manifesto by Aimi Hamraie & Kelly Fritsch
• Critical Creative Corrective Cacophonous Comical: Closed Captions by Emily Watlington
• Data Rituals in Intimate Infrastructures: Crip Time and the Disabled Cyborg Body as an Epistemic Site of Feminist Science by Laura Forlano
• Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer
• Imagining a Neuroqueer Technoscience by Jessica Sage Rauchberg
• Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument by The AUMI Editorial Collective
• In My Language by Mx Baggs
• Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle by AK Thompson, Kelly Fritsch, & Clare O'Connor
• Musicking by Christopher Small
• Other Forms of Conviviality by Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos
• Remote Access: Crip Nightlife, Artistry, and Technoscience by Aimi Hamraie & Kevin Gotkin
• Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies by Michele Friedner & Stefan Helmreich
• Stuttering Can Create Time by People Who Stutter Create (Jia Bin, Delicia Daniels, JJJJJerome Ellis, Conor Foran, Kristel Kubart)
• The Adaptive Use Instruments Project: Cycling ‘74 by Andrew Pask & Pauline Oliveros
• The Beauty of Spaces Created For and By Disabled People by s.e. smith
• Troubling Transplant Temporality through Crip Technoscience and a Sensory Aesthetics of Time, Machine, and Health by Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, & Bibo Keeley

i hope you find something engaging in the list! (apologies for the poor formatting, my web design skills are definitely still growing!)

this project was deeply exciting to work on as these topics are both personally relevant and general academic interests of mine. disability-related literature has been a growing pocket of what i'm reading and much of it, even when not directly tied to sound or music, further informed my writing for the project. alison kafer's "feminist, queer, crip" was a particularly solid example of this and is a text i found connected quite well to themes of world-remaking discussed in the "crip technoscience manifesto". altogether, my reading for the project spurred a lot of unique engagements with both writing and musicking as both a producer of an infrasonic piece of dance music as well as a listener of other performers, live and otherwise. my thirst for creatively engaging disability with my musical endeavors has only grown, spurring some exciting ideas for future projects. who knows, maybe i'll give audio plugin coding in Max/MSP a try! regardless, this project taught me a lot, including needed reminders of how central my health is to my academic and creative output, which obviously meshes well with the topics at hand. thanks for reading my little reflection on "crip musicking"! if you know me offline, feel free to contact me if you'd like to read and listen to the project :)

2024-01-08

new beginnings

happy inagural blog post!