Monday, August 23, 2021, 6 pm ET
Free or pay what you can.
Register here. Limited capacity.
Accessibility: ASL interpretation and live-captions will be available.

New and experienced filmmakers are invited to a private workshop to learn critical concepts to creatively integrate forms of accessibility for disabled audiences into their films. Forms of access are usually treated as so-called “accommodations,” left to third-party service providers to perform after a film or video has been completed. Understanding access as a way in or a means of approach, participants will be asked to reimagine their creative process beginning with access as the first step in conceiving what a film is and how it will communicate with its audiences.

Workshop participants will be invited to frame access at intersections of disability, race, language, class, and gender, while primarily focusing on two more-or-less codified access technologies––audio description (AD) for Blind, low vision, and other audiences and captioning for Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and other audiences. 

Lord will present examples of how disabled filmmakers have used access as integrated formal tools in their films, while working through critical questions that emerge around practices of audio description and captioning––asking how the access needs of our audiences might guide our approaches to filmmaking. These complex and layered forms of communication are often presented as apparently neutral translations of images and sounds. But, of course, as numerous Blind, Deaf, and disabled audiences, artists, and activists have shown, these translations are anything but neutral and often render segregation, censorship, and insufficient information, while presenting manifold possibilities as creative and artistic tools. 

Bio of the artist

Jordan Lord is a filmmaker, writer, and artist, working primarily in video, text, and performance. Their work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts, framing and support, access and documentary. Their video and performance work has been shown internationally at venues including MoMA, ARGOS, Camden Arts Centre, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Performance Space NY (as part of the festival “I wanna be with you everywhere”). Their exhibition “Prophetic Memory” is currently in-progress online and at various sites via Artists Space (New York, NY). They teach at Hunter College, CUNY (New York).

This event is part of Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency. To find out more about the program, click here.

Banner Image: Jordan Lord, After… After… (Access), HD video, 2018. Image description: The inside of a body, including a spine and other organs, appears on a laptop screen. A white person’s hand reaches toward the laptop’s keyboard. On top of the hand, a caption reads: “In learning to make a film, students are taught to show rather than tell.”