Uncertain Access: Art, Design, and Technology

This session explores access not as a fixed solution but as a site of uncertainty, experimentation, and creativity. While institutional approaches to accessibility often emphasise efficiency, standardisation, and compliance, disability-led practices reveal that access is rarely smooth. Instead, it emerges through slowness, unpredictability, friction, and care. We foreground access as a meaning-making process—shaped by aesthetics, ethics, and the conditions under which bodies and technologies encounter one another.

We distinguish the language of inclusive design—typically practiced by designers and engineers—from the interpretive frameworks of the humanities. While design discourse often focuses on functionality and legibility, humanities-based approaches examine how artworks and built objects function as sites of representation and negotiation. This panel draws on art history, disability theories, and bioethics to rethink the cultural life of coded objects: how they are made, circulated, and understood—not only as technologies, but as expressions of social values, power, and political imaginaries.

We invite proposals from scholars, artists, curators, and technologists investigating disability-centered approaches to art and design. We are particularly interested in how uncertainty—whether affective, infrastructural, or epistemic—can be embraced as part of the design process.

This session seeks to build a generative vocabulary for access that transcends disciplines. By approaching art as a form of technology and access as a cultural practice, we ask: What kind of tools and environments do we create when we design not just for bodies, but with them? And what does it mean to locate the work of access within ethics, imagination, and cultural production?