Accessibility

sekai: Welcome to the Inbetween Machine. The podcast that adds

a touch of excitement to your hybrid lifestyle. Chances are

you're tuning in while flipping through a magazine, sitting on

the train or eating a sandwich. Our goal is simple, to enhance

your hybrid skills. My name is Sekai Makoni, and I'm a cultural

programmer, workshop facilitator, podcaster and

artist. I'm a light skinned black woman with Afro hair, a

brown top and green trousers. I'm your host here to explore

various aspects of hybrid living in each episode. Joining me are

the people who created the Toolkit for the Inbetween and

special guests, all sharing insights into the world of

hybrid experiences. The Toolkit for the Inbetween takes the

form of a website. It's like a creative toolbox for hybrid

events brought to you by members from three Dutch cultural

institutions: The Hmm, a platform and laboratory for internet and

digital cultures; affect lab, a research driven creative

storytelling studio focused on an inclusive future; and MU, a

hybrid art house with interdisciplinary exhibitions

and innovative education. Together, they spent the past

two years experimenting to find ways to make cultural

experiences engaging for both in-person and online audiences.

You'll find a link to the toolkit in the show notes. In

today's episode, we're delving into access and ethics for

hybrid gatherings. So grab a cup of tea or coffee and settle in,

and let's explore the fascinating intersection of the

physical and digital in our lives. Welcome to the Inbetween

Machine. The inbetween. When we're recording this, it's a

calm December morning. It's raining outside and not as cold

as it usually is this time of year. And I'm in an Amsterdam

podcast studio joined by toolkit member, Margarita Osipian. As an

independent curator, cultural programmer, and researcher, she

takes on different roles. But today she is here wearing her

hat as the programmer of The Hmm, welcome Margarita.

margarita: Thank you Sekai!

sekai: And would you be able to give us a visual description of

yourself?

margarita: Definitely. I'm an olive skinned woman and I have

black, long black hair. And I'm wearing quite comfy clothes

because as you mentioned, it's really rainy here in Amsterdam.

I am wearing black pants and a beige wool sweater.

sekai: We also have two very special guests who are both

joining us from outside the Netherlands. Our first guest is

Ren Loren Britton, who is part of the duo MELT, together with

his pair. As arts-design-researchers MELT studies and

experiments with shape-shifting processes as they meet

technologies, sensory media and critical pedagogies in a warming

world. MELT currently builds projects along four different

research tracks: Access Server, the Meltionary, Counting Feelings

and Zeitgebers. Their arts-design-research kicks up practices that

generate material and infrastructural transformations

that intersect trans-feminism and disability justice. Ren and

Iz prepared for today's podcast together, inter-weaving

their insights into the questions and Ren is joining us

for the conversation. Welcome Ren! Happy to be here! So our

second guest is Faya Kabali-Kagwa, an innovative

multidisciplinary creative practitioner whose work centers

on identity accessibility and public engagement. Faye has an

uncanny ability to read the post of the cultural zeitgeist. She

cultivates ideas that bridge gaps between audiences and

mediums. Welcome Faya. Thank you. Thank you for being here.

Um, could you each give us a visual description of yourself

and a bit about the environment you're in at the moment, sharing

as much as you feel comfortable. Ren, we can start with you.

ren: Okay yeah, thank you so much. So this is Ren speaking. I

appear to you today as a masc presenting trans person who's

privileged as white. I'm wearing big grey and black glasses and I

have a purple sweater. I've got brown curly hair and a little

new mustache and I'm in my studio. I've got some...

basically a boring white wall behind me. But behind you that

you cannot see in the studio room is many, many plants. I'm

happy to be here with you all.

sekai: Lovely to have you! And Faya...

faya: Yes, so I am a black woman. I regrettably have

relaxed hair that looks above. And behind me is my bookshelf,

filled with lots of African literature. And in the corner

you'll see a graphic of a man sitting down with a hat in front

of him, begging for concepts. I thought it was really cool, got

it about eight years ago. So yeah, that's me.

sekai: Brilliant. Thank you for joining us. So today we'll be

discussing two toolkit experiments, The Hmm ON a

Lighter Internet and Counter Consideration, and expanding on

them through the conversation with our guests. Margarita.

Could you give a short description of both toolkit

experiments?

margarita: Yes, definitely. So The Hmm ON the Lighter Internet

was an experiment that began with research, accompanied by an

event that looked at the growing tension between increasing

connectivity to the internet globally, and the impact of this

on the environment. The growing increase in internet use, and

the generation of more and more data not only impacts the

environment, it also exacerbates the global digital divide. And

as a parallel project to this event, we updated our live

stream platform that we had built in collaboration with Karl

Moubarak. And we added different view modes, so we

added video with a range of resolution options, low-low res

mode, which was a thumbnail that changed every 15 seconds,

accompanied with live captions, an audio only option and a text

only option. We added these features to make the platform

more accessible and to explore what low tech and low data

internet solutions can look like. And for the event itself,

we offered specially discounted online group tickets as a way to

stimulate people to watch our live stream together rather than

watching it alone at home or on their phone. And by providing

these different view modes, we opened up the possibility for

viewers with unstable or unaffordable internet access to

join one of our events. Having these options also gave viewers

a choice in how much data they were sending and receiving

during the course of the event. Data use, which included

information about uploads and downloads was also clearly

visible for each user at the top-right of the live stream

platform. With this experiment, we really wanted to explore the

inequalities present in hybridity, and who can even

access the often data heavy digital interactions and online

events that those of us with affordable and stable internet

access take for granted. The second experiment we want to

share is Counter Consideration, which was a playful hybrid

experience that took place online and on-site. The on-site

iteration of it was in a park in Eindhoven during STRP

festival. The work was created by affect lab in collaboration

with Faya Kabali-Kagwa, who is here with us today, and it

was commissioned by STRP. So invoking the spirit of the

transistor radio, audiences were invited to physically move

between multiple audio channels, while dropping into various

sonic realities, ranging from flash fiction, vibrant

landscapes, intimate conversations and tales of

techno-culture. In Counter Consideration the physical

location was important in the on site experience. Audience

members walked around in a park using headphones and a special

app that they downloaded and saw visual clues of locations for

the different radio channels. The channels were carefully

placed in the park, which connected the story to the

locations. Visitors navigated their bodies to tune into

different channels, creating a new form of intimacy in relation

to the story. And for the online visitors, this worked a bit

differently since they were navigating a specially designed

website as a way to move through these channels. And the website

had different shapes that were corresponding to the shapes of

the park that the onsite audience was in. This also

created this feeling of being inside of a map which felt like

a game and created a kind of playful experience. I took part

in this experience as a visitor in the park itself. And I also

really loved being in these kinds of like in-between spaces

between the radio channels, so you would kind of move through

the park and sometimes you would hear a part of one piece from an

artist while simultaneously hearing a part of another piece.

So I thought it was also a really, a really beautiful

experience in that sense.

sekai: Brilliant. So at first glance, these two experiments

might seem quite different from one another. How do you see them

as interconnected in relation to accessibility?

margarita: Yeah, it is true that on the surface, they might seem

different. But accessibility when we think about it in

relation to disability justice and accessibility in relation to

internet access and digital divide are interwoven with one

another. There's a connection around access. So building tools

and thinking from the point of access, that opens up space for

more inclusivity and bringing people together, who might not

otherwise get connected. With Counter Consideration, this idea

of the lighter internet was used as a design tool, allowing

people to join from around the world who might not have strong

or consistent internet access. And with The Hmm ON a Lighter

Internet, we built new tools that provided different ways to

experience a livestreamed event, with live captions, different

forms of contrast, and giving space for people to center

different senses at their own choosing. And of course,

challenges around access for people, which are created by the

systems that we live in, are intersectional. So I think this

intersectionality is actually coming through by talking about

and placing these two experiments next to one another

in this conversation.

sekai: Brilliant. So part of our website, toolkitfortheinbetween.com

contains a vast archive of historical hybrid

events, and to take you into the deep historical connections,

each episode we feature two of those case studies. So let's

hear the first case study now.

voice-over: For this case study interlude, we want to share

Cellular Trans_Actions by Victoria Vesna. Telephones with

their rich social history are the most ubiquitous

communication technology used by humans. With the rising

popularity of cellphones in the 90s, analog systems visibly

fragmented, and many social environments radically changed.

With no established social protocols for cellphone-use in

public spaces, constant sounds of interruptions became a daily

collective performance. There was no more escape, whether

using a phone yourself or responding to someone in close

proximity receiving a call. In this context, American media

artist Victoria Vesna created the performance Cellular

Trans_Actions. The approach was one of readymade performance by

audience members who were requested to leave their cell

phones on and not restrain themselves from placing calls if

they felt compelled to communicate with someone at any

moment during her talk. They were also given phone numbers of

other audience members to break the usual communication in

public spaces. The audience is encouraged to engage with each

other on a specific topic and express their views based on

their cultural background. They were even encouraged to speak to

each other in their native language, leaving the artist out

of the conversation entirely. In this way, the discussion is not

led by the artist but by the audience, allowing for a deep

connection to form between colours. While the performance

could be watched online remotely, the interactive part

took place exclusively on site. Much of the content of the

performance was left to chance, dependent on the size of the

audience and the number of audience members who chose to

leave their cellphones on. Through its context-dependent

and chance-driven nature, Cellular Trans_Actions also

exposed the differences that emerged across geographical

locations, cultures and languages. In a 2001 performance,

the audience was asked to discuss issues around the

September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. This performance

can be seen as low tech, as the audience participated through a

cellular phone. Though relatively new at the time, the

cellular phone did not require fancy hardware, or high speed

internet connections.

sekai: So this notion of hybridity does not have a

definitive definition. So to start, we'd love for each of you

to share an example of hybridity, either from your own

practice or outside of it.

ren: So, in the work that Iz and I do as MELT, we understand

these questions as a kind of political design framework. So

thinking about hybridity in terms of who's explicitly and

implicitly welcomed into a space or not. So in the work that we

do, because we practice from a disability justice framework, Iz

and I, with MELT, we really think a lot around multimodal

design. So we assume that through layering modes of

accessibility into our work that a broader or disabled audience is

reached. So this means that we always work with multiple modes

of sharing information. This can be audio and textual, visual and

image descriptions, sensorial and playful. So this layering

prioritises accessibility for trans and neurodivergent audiences

as well as other disabled people. Yeah, so the work that

we wanted to share that connects to this question of hybridity is

actually one that we made alongside Margarita with the

Sonic Acts Biennial, and it's called presence-past presence-

present presence-future, a meditation for trans and

disabled futures. So with this work, we used a lamp in an

exhibition space during the Sonic Acts Biennial, as a means to

connect online and offline audiences. So every person that

joined the meditation, whether they be at home or whether they

be in the exhibition space, would impact the colour of the

exhibition light. So through this, it was a way of thinking

with presence beyond one space, so presence in both at

home where people may be joining from online, or also in the

exhibition space. So we could sense each other across time-

space, colour-space. And this was a kind of, for us, we think

about it in terms of hybridity as a kind of multisided here. So

wherever the hybrid is, is also here. And it's also here, and

it's also here, and it's also here. So for us, this kind of

multimodal design practice, and hybridity really is about making

ways of accessing work or whatever kind of work, if it

happens to be a space, an exhibition, a podcast, kind of

great and engaging in each of its tiers.

sekai: Brilliant, I love that. And Faya, for you. How do you

think of hybridity? And could you share an example?

faya: This question about hybridity is ultimately a

question around audience and why you make work and who you make

work for. And I think that sometimes, people, but I think

it's also an act of translation, right. So just because something

is happening in one space doesn't mean that the other

audience necessarily has to have the exact same experience. So

you kind of have to think about whatever story or message that

you're trying to bring across, and how it will land, right?

Ren was talking about the experience, like if you're at

home, it's very different than walking to an installation

space, which has been designed specifically for you and created

to engender specific feelings. Whereas if you're at home, or in

another space, there might be, you know, many people around

you, you might have a different relationship to

other people, or yourself or the way that you know, you feel safe

or not. And I'm still in the experimental phase, I think that

a project... A project that people spoke about, at one time

was called The Shopping Dead, where I did a WhatsApp

production on, you know, on WhatsApp, during the

pandemic, it was a way to get South African audiences into

theater. So it was just a text exchange, but it was live. And I

think that that live element was really important for people and

it followed like a script. So there was a beginning, a middle

and an end. But what I found interesting was that some

people, you know, forgot to tune in when it was live. But they,

you know, they would send messages and say, I didn't

watch this thing live, but I was able to read the messages and I

was thoroughly entertained, or because it is a text exchange

and it is on their phone, people didn't necessarily have to keep

up with the tempo or the rhythm in which we had intended to

intended to have them receive the information. They had space

and agency to control when they looked, how much they engaged and

what they wanted to revisit, if anything, so yeah.

sekai: Brilliant. Thank you. WhatsApp theater. I love it. Ren

and Faya, it'd be great to hear your reflections on the toolkit

experiments that Margarita outlined.

faye: Um, I was part of the live, one of the live sessions that

they had on the lighter internet. And I think because

it was new, it was a little overwhelming. I thought it was

cool. But there were a lot of things you could do, as

Margarita explained, right? Like, you could make it text

only or you could make it... you could have the video or you

could even send emojis like you could send emojis and feel like

everybody was watching with you. And I think that that

interactivity was super cool... was super cool to see happen in

real time.

The Hmm ON a Lighter Internet, I took part in a live

session, but I was in South Africa. And I thought it was

interesting having the options to control what I viewed how I

viewed it. And then there were emoji options. So I had a sense

that I was watching with other people or like I was not the

only one in my house watching something happen, which was

cool, but I think right now as the toolkit stands, I really

enjoy the ways in which you can also see the different kinds of

experiments that people were doing. And also kind of, you can

also choose the different kinds of experiments, like is it

something that was looking specifically at hybridity, was

it something that was looking specifically at data usage? And

I think that the documentation of the sides, and

the different projects has been really exciting to see. So

I'm... that has me excited, clearly I cannot form words

sekai: (laugh) ... life.

Counter Consideration, on the other hand, was looking at the ways in

which - it was commenting on a lot of different things, but one of

the things is also looking at other people's conception of

digital art or digital work, and what that could look like.

And so the idea of a radio, the idea of listening to

stories, and like, our oral storytelling was also something

that was very precious for us in in the conceptualising of

what we wanted to do. And people wandering around the garden and

being able to move between channels, also kind of like

highlights the ways that, you know, there are all kinds of

different radio stations, and if you like move the

knob of the radio stations, you get to kind of like tap in and

out of different worlds. So having people be able to embody,

to embody that in the physical space was something that we

thought was interesting to try. And then on the other hand,

because it was essentially radio pieces, or different audio

pieces, sorry, making that accessible to people who weren't

with us in the physical space, but also giving them the same

sense of physicality and being able to move around, that

was important for us, that we didn't dilute the stories,

but obviously, the experiences were very, very different.

sekai: I do wonder, though, within that, like, maybe one of

the challenges of making something accessible and having

like multiple layers that you can access it at, can that also

be quite overwhelming, like can it maybe in some ways, maybe create

an inaccessibility? So it's like, okay, so there's so many

options of how we engage with that. Like is that also, because

when you say, when you first started speaking, it was a

little bit overwhelming in terms of the amount of options? Yeah,

I wonder if that's a challenge as well, maybe Ren you could

reflect on that.

ren: Yeah, I would be really happy to. So I'm more connected

to the project through being an admirer rather than someone who

has directly engaged with it so far. But I think something that

comes up for me when looking at the work that The Hmm is doing

with these different projects, that Margarita and Faya you're

sharing about is that there's social protocols that I think

are rewritten as well as technical protocols that are

rewritten. And I find that in disability justice informed

spaces, there's a lot of social protocol rewriting. So I think

that it can often be times that for allistic, meaning non

autistic or non disabled people entering into disability culture

when thinking about how to gain access into space takes time and

commitment as well as for disabled people to craft what it

is that we might need. So I think that it's important to

think about the kinds of awkwardnesses or slippages

that come up in terms of coming into a different kind of

culture, perhaps, about how it is that we socialise with each

other. And I find that that kind of translation work thinking

around like non disabled and disabled audiences being online

together. For me, something I find really exciting about these

platforms is that they do offer multiple modes of participation

that I totally agree with Faya that I think can be overwhelming

at times. And also for me, it can be really relieving to have

another sort of participation open up to register what

participation might look like rather to kind of innovate, what

kinds of forms of this kind of presencing that we might have,

that really make it possible for... Yeah, all different kinds

of folks to join in a way that I think an average Zoom call, for

example, where there's a kind of like a pressure to participate

with a certain, like a video on and you speak all the time and

like written communication is not also privileged, or that

there's also a certain bandwidth that's required in order to join

the call. I find those all quite... Yeah, normative ways of

producing a space. And I find it really interesting how the

social protocols perhaps with the work that The Hmm is doing

also shift what the technical protocols could be, and

potentially open up a different way of being online and in the

different kinds of cultural space.

faya: Yeah, I just want to respond to that quickly. I do

think, you know, when we're talking about what The Hmm is

doing, I think it's prefaced by saying that, like it was an

experimental space. And I think that when we are doing work,

that's hybrid, thinking about social protocols also becomes

important, I think, when you're presenting any kind of

work, you need to orient your audience. But as soon as you

have people having two or three or four different experiences

simultaneously, really thinking through how people are coming to

that, to that story, to that experiment, to that space, from

the outside is really important. And I think sometimes, as

artists, as cultural workers, whatever you want to call

yourself, I think sometimes when you're really in it, it makes a

whole lot of sense to you. And really trying to figure out how

do you bring or invite people with you? And what are the step

by step, the boring things, the things that are going to take

maybe 10-15-20 minutes before you actually get what you want

to do, really thinking through that is critical.

sekai: Yeah. Thank you. So Ren since your work, both

independently and as part of MELT, is focused on disability

justice, how do you embrace playfulness and experimentation

in your work, while balancing questions of accessibility?

margarita: And Ren, maybe if you don't mind, I wanted to maybe

give a little bit of context. Also, in thinking through this

question, in relation to The Hmm ON a Lighter Internet experiment,

when we built the platform, we also had to sort of work

through challenges of live captioning, in the sense that we

were trying as much as possible to use open source tools, open

libraries. And we actually came up against the fact that at this

moment, the Google library and the MUX library that was

available to us, actually provided the most accurate

caption. And so we had to make a decision to use the Google

library and the MUX library, as it was giving the most accurate

live caption, which, in a way, also pushed up against our kind

of our want to use these open source tools. And so yeah, from

that experience, that's where this kind of question comes to

you. And curious how you approach it in your work, which

I also appreciate, for its playfulness, for its

experimentation.

ren: Yeah. Thanks to both of you for that question. And maybe

just to respond directly, Margarita, about what you're

bringing up. I think that's such an important question when it

comes to open access and access technologies. Because I think

that for many accessibility technologies, it's not yet at

the point where we can choose our dependencies. And so this

kind of framework of being able to choose your dependencies and

not being reliant on big FM, Google, Apple, Microsoft,

Amazon, Facebook, etc, etc, companies, is not yet the place

where it is with a lot of accessibility tools. And that's

something that from within the open source community, this kind

of friction is something that I'm super excited to see people

keep working on, to think with access tools that we can

actually choose our dependencies rather than being dependent on

these big companies, which we don't want to give our data to.

However, we need them because of the kinds of access that they

make. So that's like an ongoing, long term interest of mine and

Iz's as MELT. Yeah, and maybe to come to this question around

playfulness and experimentation, while balancing questions around

access. We, in our work, we define access as what you might

need to be in the space fully. So if you take that to mean what

access is it opens up a lot of questions. So for us that means

how can we name what we need? How can we feel safe to

speak in a place about our needs without internal or external

judgment? What kind of practices make it possible for us to be

fully in the space? What kind of space is this space? And

also to take it more politically, like how can we, as

Audre Lorde has said, feel fully in whatever it is that we're

doing? So in this way, frameworks from disability

justice and access practices open up a lot of experimental

energies, because to get into a space where it's safe enough for

us to express our needs and to show up fully, it requires a

kind of possibility for safe playfulness, which is also to

say it requires our vulnerability and it requires us

to intentionally craft spaces of trust. So in our work, access

needs or requirements of what anyone would need to be in

this space can be uncomfortable to share when we're in ableist

spaces. So access needs can be things like sign language

interpretation, or it can be something like needing specific

lighting to not get a headache. And I think if you share what we

need, sometimes it's held, and sometimes it's respected and

other times it's not. And so this kind of tension of finding

ways to navigate around the inaccessibility of ableist

spaces while still playing in them, to kind of navigate in a

being visible, being invisible, creating space, taking space,

dance, I think, is also a place where there's a creative energy,

this kind of resistance and participation duality that I

think that we work with and exceed in our practice, very

much creates the space of playfulness that I think that we

try to open up in our work. But thankfully, ableism in our work

does not structure all the places that we're in, like this

one. And when we're not in ableist spaces, also by sharing what

access, like what access needs we might have, this also creates

possibility for connection. And I think that this possibility of

connection or possibility of meeting each other, through

access is also very much the ways of connecting that we try

to cultivate in our work. And I think that from that place, a

lot of playfulness is there. And I thought I maybe would share

about a recent work of ours. So a recent work of ours called

Unforgetting as Caring: Braille N' Speak, FTM issue no. 45,

and the Zenith Hearing Aid. It's a work that connects

artefacts from disability and trans histories,

to kind of shapeshift the boundaries of the technoscience

canon. And in this work, we think a lot with appreciation,

for example. So thinking about appreciation is something that's

a bit different from longing or love. It's something that can

both hold the possibility and the difficulty of something, you

can appreciate something without being fully aligned with it. So

with many assistive technologies from history, sometimes they're

complicated. So these technologies make accessibility

for our users, but they respond sometimes more to the ableism or

audisms of their making, which is often why they're made in the

first place. So I think to hold both the difficulty of wanting

to make access in places, or the access that has been made

historically in places, but also the... Yeah, the reason why

these things are made is not always because disabled people

have been the authors of every step forward. So I think that

this kind of... holding both, I think then also the friction that

comes with holding both is a place that a lot of playfulness

and surprise comes from because of trying to navigate the

inaccessibilities that we're surrounded by.

sekai: Yeah, and I kind of wanted to link back to what you were

saying before around social protocols. So even the notion of

us using like visual descriptions, I think, is really

interesting. And we were reflecting kind of before this

episode started that, as a black woman of mixed heritage, I'm

very used to foregrounding my racial identity. But I noticed

that with people that are white or white passing, and also when

it comes to their gender identity, they may not feel

comfortable naming that, and I quite enjoy that friction in

terms of I think it's quite good for I don't know, a white man to

have to name that. Or if a whole panel is all white men. There's

something where you having to name the visual representation

of yourself in that space can, can be a helpful, an interesting

friction that we would have... Those who have sight would have

visually taken in, but I don't know, I feel like the auditory

element of that is quite interesting. Would you be able

Ren to speak to kind of like, yeah, the positive frictions

that can come up when you use disability justice as an access

point?

ren: Yeah, I would love to talk about that. So maybe, so visual

descriptions, as you said, are a practice that comes from the blind and low vision

community and they're also something that's highly

contested. That's not, I'm not- as a sighted person, I'm not

best well positioned to speak about this, I would like to say,

but it is something that I have read from blind and low vision

community and know more about their, yeah, more about this

discussion. However, I would say that it is something that as

sighted people when we walk into a space, there's a lot of

information that comes by looking around. And so I think

in certain places, it's a highly political question. And also

often there's a lot of pushback from various communities around

how one names oneself in space, I think as a trans

masculine person, for example, I guess that's something that I

could disappear about myself in my visual description, however I

choose not to. As a person privileged as white, I think

that it's also in terms of understanding myself as an anti

racist that I name my positionality in this space, as

well as a way to hold that positionality and take

responsibility for it. I find that these kinds of frictions

that it produces in spaces also reveals or shares a lot about

what people know, a project that I really admire is Alt Text as

Poetry, which also talks about visual descriptions, or also the

practices or politics of alt text and image description,

talking about when you describe something, what do you see? And

this is a highly political question, as we know. So I

think, yeah, I think also maybe just linking back a bit to the

previous project that I was just mentioning, in this video work

Unforgetting as Caring that Iz and I made, we're also always

trying to think about multiple senses being engaged

simultaneously, like we had said earlier. And so I think it's

also something that I've been learning more about is also

tactile descriptions, for example, is something that

people who are also blind and deaf also request from time to

time, or a different kinds of sensorial ways of knowing the

world, which is another sort of access point for autistic

people, for example. So I think that, I think of visual

descriptions as kind of one tool in a broad toolkit, to use the

framework of the toolkit, of ways of making access for us that

really might challenge the kinds of privileging of normative non

disabled ways of being in the world that present a certain

kind of human as the way to be human, which I think is what

this friction pushes up against, and that kind of social

protocol that pushes back against other ways of being

human that are needed to be upheld and valued. And I find, I

think that's the work that this does.

sekai: Brilliant, thank you so much. So Faya, the experiment

that you were part of developing, Counter Consideration, used the

notion of a lighter internet as a design tool. You also have

another project, The Shopping Dead that you developed, where

you use WhatsApp as the platform for the project that you spoke

about earlier. So how do you approach accessibility and

inclusion in your hybrid projects through the platforms

and technical structures that you choose to work with?

faya: Thank you for that question, because it was

something that I wanted to... I wanted to bring up. Because

earlier, Ren was talking about choosing dependencies. And at

the time, when I had chosen WhatsApp, people were just like

why WhatsApp? This was also during the pandemic. And so a

lot of people were saying, let's move to Signal, let's move to

Telegram, especially because of data security. And I'm like, I

want to reach African audiences primarily, and they are not

shifting. And that might be a controversial answer, but at

first I was kind of just like this is, if I moved it to a

different platform, I wouldn't have the reach that I want to.

And this also doesn't mean that when we use platforms that are

linked to bigger corporations, that they're not... that they

cannot be subversive, because many of the communities that I'm

also a part of, we are not, we are not made... the things are

not made for us. I think a lot about mass participation, right.

And mass participation, like assumes that all of us in some

way can have like a true essence. But even in this

context, that we are speaking in now, it would be different if

you had another African person who, for example, may not be

fluent in English, or may not have access to the same kinds of

literature or culture. I think that I have been emphasised in a

lot of ways and I understand, for example, European and

American references in a lot of ways that other people may not

have access to. So when you talk about like, so we've been

talking about having to give people context for things that

they might not have access to, whether that be visual clues or

sensorial clues. When we're talking about people coming from

different cultures, then there's also another mode of

translation. And so I'm thinking about, does that mean that we...

I think then, as artists, we... I think sometimes we need to be

like super clear about who we are speaking to. I don't

necessarily always think that we can speak to everyone at the

same time, but um... it's a bit mushy, because I, you know,

we,... because I was just thinking about, like, what would

happen if we had another person here who had certain

disabilities, and then compounded by the fact that they

were African, compounded by the fact that they were in a limited

internet, perhaps, maybe not, looking at language and like,

what other considerations will we have to make in order to make

that happen? So that's one line of thinking. But on the

other hand, I'm always... when I'm thinking

about audience, and I'm thinking about my first impulse to

experiment or to explore, I'm always looking at the mediums,

or the ways of communication or expression that a large audience

is following, whether I like it or not, because I also know that

I have my own sensibilities that are, I think, a lot of the

times middle class, right. So I'm kind of like, regardless of

what I think about WhatsApp, I feel that a lot of people are

using WhatsApp. Regardless if I think soap operas are the

greatest thing, soap operas, for

example, have been, like the most consistent form of

entertainment in South Africa, because we had like soap operas

that would play on specific channels, and would run for

years, my parents grew up on Days of our Lives. And the other one...

sekai: The Bold and the Beautiful?

faye: The Bold and the Beautiful! Did my dad not watch that thing until it ended? Until they

switched it off- sekai: he was committed. Faye: that was a consistent

thing in our lives. And so I do think that even if you want to

be like that is low brow, these become important tools in

thinking through what kinds of entertainment or what kinds of

stories or what kinds of modes that people are interested in.

Also, because if they're that popular, it means that they're

cutting across a wide intersection of people. And then

that can be your starting place.

sekai: And I suppose as well, what happens when we say

popularity is good, that like, rather than like we need to do this

obscure, abstract thing that not everyone may necessarily

understand that that's high art or creativity. But actually popular

culture can be used as a means to reach a wider audience. And I

think within what you were saying there, I think there is

something in another way of thinking in terms of like the

global South, I think there's something to making a very

specific audience, right. So if you said, oh actually this is

very unapologetically for African audiences with low

internet speed... that actually creates a different type of

access when you do limit it to a specific audience. And maybe

limit isn't the best word. But I think again, there's something

fruitful in that kind of division or specificity that

actually, non global South audiences would learn a lot from,

if they were willing to be a witness and not be centred in

the experience. As we wrap up today's episode, I'd love to

hear a quick takeaway from all three of you on the theme of

access and ethics. But before we dive into that, we have another

case study.

voice-over: For this case study interlude, we want to share Hole

In Space by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. One evening

in November 1980, live broadcast from two distinct locations in

the USA, were suddenly displayed to each other. Life-size screens

at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, and

The Broadway, a department store in LA, connected unsuspecting

passers-by. Suddenly, people on the street could see, hear and

speak with each other through a televisual portal, as if

encountering each other on the same sidewalk. Rabinowitz and

Galloway were able to create the sculpture after applying for a

public tender by NASA, as the technology was unaffordable and

inaccessible to most people. Conceptually, Hole In Space

broadened people's understanding of how we can communicate across

remote spaces in real time. What makes the project extra special,

also considering our contemporary video conferencing

tools, is that not only was 1:1 life-size scale video

used, but the virtual space was also aligned with the real one

in a way that allows normal human interactions, such as eye

contact. At the time, the project was conceptually and

technologically advanced. According to the website cdm.link,

the project can be seen as the mother of all video chats.

The artists deliberately decided to not use self-view video as well.

According to them, self-view video monitors would have degraded the

situation into a self-conscious video conference. It only took

two days before planned encounters were organised, as

friends and loved ones reunited with each other via the

sculpture. The project challenged existing

understandings of space and remoteness, bringing together

two public audiences on sidewalks 3000 kilometers apart in real-time.

margarita: Yes, I would... I don't know if it's necessarily

going to expand specifically on the topic. But something that

I found really important from the conversations was this idea

of the live element. So in the, in the hybrid artwork that Ron had

shared, the guided meditation for trans and disabled futures,

where the light was changing, so you could really feel the

presence of other people. And also in Faya's Shopping Dead work,

which was about how you could also still feel presence even if

it's just through text. I think there's this notion actually, of

being together in a specific moment in time that is really

valuable. And it can be done, also, through really simple

means, it doesn't have to be a very complex installation, it can

also just be a WhatsApp group where you're chatting together.

So I think, yeah, one of my kind of takeaway is also the

importance of this collective moment. And it actually brought me

back to a conversation we were having yesterday, during a kind

of brainstorm session with The Hmm, where we were talking about,

like, these tours that we've been doing, and they're actually

quite popular, and we were doing them where we were sort of

hopping around the internet going to different, like

alternative platforms together, for example. But also, we did

one where we took a bus to a data center, so two very

different experiences. But I realised actually, that both of

them were really popular because we were just together in

this specific moment in time, and that there's something

really powerful about that. So I think that's, that's my

takeaway. And also, I have one other little one. And I'm

going to quote Faya, because I think you kind of summarised it

really well, when you said, "we can't speak to everyone at the

same time". And I think that also really gestures towards a

lot of what Ren was talking about, as well, that we can't

speak to everyone at the same time. And that it's important

that we also state that explicitly, and make that visible,

that we state the choices we make, rather than just assuming

or presenting them as some kind of neutral choice. So I think

that's my second takeaway from this conversation that I really,

really enjoyed as well.

sekai: Thank you. So Ren, what would be a takeaway you might

want to share with us?

ren: Yeah, thanks so much. I think I would say this notion of

creating a limit or also as I thought of it before, maybe

privileging a certain audience that also Margarita was just

talking about like, there are ways of connecting on- and

offline in terms of hybridity, that are about: who do we

privilege in this space? And what kinds of modes of joining

because of who we are privileging and to see cultural

contexts that were privileging. Yeah, how do they make meaning

for us to be together? I think that would be my takeaway.

sekai: Thank you. And Faya?

faya: I guess we're going 3 for 3. But I will bring it back to I

think what Ren was saying, I think earlier, when, I think

you were saying that when you and Iz work together, you ask,

what are the needs? Like, what are the needs, what do we need,

or what do the people need in this space? Do we feel

comfortable enough to express our needs? Do we feel safe

enough to express our needs and what even is the space? Those

questions are all speaking to something, someone specific,

it's like a collective. And I think, understanding that when

we're creating work, there usually is a we. There usually

is a we that we are speaking about and I think also making

that we public. And really not running away from that question

as I think a lot of artists are like, everybody can connect. And

often we're trying to, we reflect whatever communities we

think of and we're part of, so our friends. And so really thinking

about what you care about and what you don't necessarily care

about. With 3 for 3, thinking through audience and being

explicit about what that looks like, and who we are making/

creating for is important.

sekai: And I think within what you said, you're like, what even

is this space, I think is a very important and central question

to keep in mind. Thank you so much for all three of your

reflections and your sharings today. Thanks for hanging out

with us on this hybrid ride, you can now continue with full focus

with folding laundry, biking to a meeting, or if you're still

here with us from bed, it might be time to rest. If you're still

vibing with the in-between space, more episodes of The Inbetween

Machine are either already in your podcast app or on their

way. Have you binged all episodes already? Or want to

learn more about the possibilities, potentialities

and pitfalls of our in-between environment? Then go to

toolkitfortheinbetween.com