Indexing and Prototyping Trans*Crip Tech - Queering Urban Spaces

In the organizer's words:

mit Ren Loren Britton

What have you hacked to make it work for you and your community? Propositions of linear time? Assumptions about the correct amount of rest? Heteronormative assumptions on what constitutes kinship or family? A lack of imagination around how to share resources? This workshop is for you.

Join in to rehearse together trans*crip technoscientific technologies so that we can take up space in what is called “technology”. Moving from a value based politic that seeks out joyful pasts, presents and futures for non-normative bodies and minds – following the development of a disability justice tech vein; together we will move with an expansive definition of technology that holds space for practices of community organizing, resource finding, and sharing, and techno-vernacular creativity ie. hacking stuff for our specific needs. Here we will prototype and index technologies that already exist, but might not yet be called technologies, towards make our lives plural, joyful, sustainable and full of connection and possibility. Outcomes of the workshop might be: adding a technology that you practice with but that is not yet recognized as a technology to the ongoing index, prototyping and designing a technology through simple means that you cannot have physical access to due to migration/climate change/epistemicide or inventing your own index to hold with love your or your community’s collection of technological artifacts.

Bio

Ren Loren Britton is a trans*disciplinary artist-designer reverberating with trans*feminism, technosciences, radical pedagogy and disability justice. The hir-story of cyberfeminism informs their focus on trans*, as in, transgender and trans*, as in, crossing contexts with feminist concerns. They are interested in how socio-technical systems make lives accessible and pleasurable. Departing from the understanding that we live in a deeply ableist white supremacist world they follow justice oriented practices by rethinking and reenacting all terms of who and what fits (in on/offline spaces) with what friction (or not) and why. Disability justice emerges in their practice as a practice of upholding and valuing all non-normative bodies and minds. 

Ren holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art and a Bachelor of Arts and of Fine Arts from Purchase College, USA. Ren has held residencies at Sonic Acts, Künstler:innenhaus Büchsenhausen, MedienWerk NRW, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Sandberg Instituut, Rupert, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research 2021. They have exhibited with multiple institutions including Sonic Acts, MU Hybrid Art House, MACBA, Transmediale, HKW, Martin Gropius Bau, Schloss Solitude, Constant, ALT_CPH Biennale, Yale School of Art & Kunsthalle Osnabrück.