Episode 45: Glitch Realm

The podcast introductory segment is composed to evoke friction. It begins with the sound of an elevator crunching as it goes up. A robotic voice says “floor two.” Then music with a mysterious tone comes on. A series of voices define Contra. Layered voices say:

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Contra is friction… Contra is texture… Contra is questions…Nuanced…Collaborative…Contra* is world-changing…Contra is innovation, messy, solidarity, interdependence…Contra is thinking about design critically. Contra is a podcast.

 

Throughout, there are sounds of typing, texting and Zoom being opened. 

Then an electric guitar bass note fades into the sound of a digital call ringing and starting. The intro ends with the sound of a Facetime call ringing and then picked up.

Hi, I’m Kelsie Acton, the project manager for the Remote Access Archive. The Remote Access Archive contains oral histories, like the ones featured in this season of the Contra* podcast. But it also contains numerous, very cool documents. This is one of a series of mini-episodes to share some of those documents with you. Today I’m looking at a video. It documents a piece of art called Glitch Realm. 

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Early at the start of the pandemic, Aimi Hamraie and Kevin Gotkin started texting about how to bring people together. Kevin thinks and has written about the ways nightlife culture and disability culture mirror each other. They decided a remote, accessible party, featuring disabled artists and DJs was the thing everyone needed. They reached out to friends and a small group came together to organize the first Remote Access Party. The group incorporated participatory access - collectively and collaboratively audio describing the images on the screen. Kevin and Louise Hickman, with help from Aimi developed the first draft of the participation guide. They also developed their own practices of sound description and developed the role of an access doula - someone who is there to respond to access in the moment. 

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Glitch Realm is a piece of interactive digital art, developed by disabled artist Yo Yo Lin and Kevin. It was part of a series of Remote Access parties hosted by Kevin and organized through the Critical Design Lab and other collaborators, including the Allied Media Conference in 2021. GlitchRealm was different from the other parties, which took place primarily through Zoom, because it presented a three-dimensional world with movable avatars, created in the digital platform Arium. You could attend either through Zoom or through Arium. In Glitch Realm there was a dance floor, a karaoke room and a quiet room that you could navigate to using your keyboard. 

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I’m going to read you a little bit of the descriptive transcript of this video. Descriptive transcripts incorporate both transcription of the sound and description of the visuals of the video. Cavar, a member of the Critical Design Lab, who worked on the Remote Access Archive between 2022 and 2024 wrote this. The descriptive transcript has time stamps, but I won’t read those - I’m just going to read it like it’s poetry. 

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Gentle humming sound plays over a neon, three-dimensionalized landscape. It rotates, showing a pair of rectangular screens, above a group of animated boxes bearing the names of attendees.

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Humming gives way to a snap-clapping rhythm. A sign reading “Karaoke” appears, rushes toward us. 

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A bench, which reads, “Sitting feels good right now / sit if you agree.”

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A voice, echoing. What is a bell? Is it a directly-struck idiophone percussion instrument? A herald of the hour? A body, complete with shoulder, waist, lips, mouth, tongue? A call to prayer?

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A group of spoons gather together. Above them reads the text “spoonies say hey!” To an increasingly-complicated rhythm, we travel through moonlike, purple-pink scenes of flowers and unidentifiable objects. 

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A screen displays mandalas, emerging and fading in a hypnotic loop.

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I live in England. Often the timezones didn’t align for me to be at the Remote Access parties. But watching the Glitch Realm video reminds of the incredible joy at the one I did get to attend. I watched beautiful dance videos and grooved on my bed. For a moment, my tiny, cold, depressing room in a crumbling building in London vanished because the only thing that existed was the screen. 

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The Remote Access Archive contains more documentation of the Remote Access parties. In addition to Glitch Realm, there’s oral histories with Kevin Gotkin and Charles Eppley, who worked on a lot of the sound description. There’s also a link to an interview with Kevin and Yo Yo where Lisa Prentice describes the parties as access magic. I hope you check out Glitch Realm. And I also hope you have a lot of access magic, including remote access, in your life today. 

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Thank you for listening. If this document touched you somehow - sparked your curiosity, made you angry, made you feel seen - you can find it in the Remote Access Archive at www.criticaldesignlab.com/project/remote-access-archive. Remember, remote access is disability culture.

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[Rhythmic pops. Strings ripple and play as Aimi speaks]

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Aimi Hamraie: 

You've been listening to Contra*, a podcast about disability design, justice, and the life world. Contra* is a production of the Critical Design Lab. This season's episodes draw on our recent project, the Remote Access Archive, created by a team of disabled researchers collaborating remotely. Learn about our projects, including the remote access archive at www.criticaldesignlab.com. 

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If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on Spotify rate and leave a review. 

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This season of Contra* is edited by Ilana Nevins. Kelsie Acton and Aimi Hamraie developed the episodes. 

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The Contra* Podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial share alike International 3.0 license.That means you can remix, repost, or recycle any of the content as long as you cite the original source, aren't making money, you don't change the credits and you share it under the same license.

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[music fades out]

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