The Center for Disability Studies invites you to join Andy Slater, Josephine Sales, and Meesh Sara Fradkin for an artist talk moderated by Jonathan Sterne. The three artists will delve into their individual practices through various forms of sound art and descriptions, and then come together in conversation about poetics and access.

Friday April 12, 4-5:30 pm ET on Zoom

Register here

Andy Slater (b. 1975 Milford, CT) is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and accessibility advocate. Andy holds a Masters in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a 2022 United States Artists fellow, 2022-2023 Leonardo CripTech Incubator fellow and a 2018 3Arts/Bodies of Work fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society For Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Users’ Sensory Shift program. Andy has been published in Array: The International Computer Music Journal, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern volume 61, Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation, English Studies in Canada, The Chicago Reader, and Jane. Andy’s current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, alt-text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design.

Video for At Arms Length by Andy Slater. The screen is blank.

Josephine Sales is an artist working with sculpture, sound, image and performance to consider how disability may expand our relational capacity. The artist’s work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kai Matsumiya, New York and The Shed. Fellowships include Leonardo, International Society for Arts, Sciences and Technology (2021-2023), Black Box Residency at University of California Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology (2022-2023), and AAPD research internship at The Northwestern Pritzker Law Center for Racial and Disability Justice (2023); and a key contributor to the set design and sculptures for Kinetic Light’s Wired. Sales received an MFA in Photography from Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College and lives and works in New York City.

Pulses 2023. A sonic description video still of a solid gray background with yellow open caption text reads [music note symbol] “I need your loooooove (time)”

Meesh Sara Fradkin is a writer, sound artist, and PhD candidate in interdisciplinary music technology at McGill University. Meesh is also a researcher at the Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory and The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology. She is currently a visiting scholar at NYU’s Center for Disability Studies. Meesh lives and works in Brooklyn and sometimes Montreal.

Video for babbling. Sound descriptions are cluttered throughout the screen in red, green, and white text with a black background.

Jonathan Sterne teaches at McGill University. He is author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (2021); MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012); The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003) all on Duke University Press; and numerous articles on media, technologies, and the politics of culture. With Mara Mills, he is writing Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed, which considers the history of rate-adjusted audio from blind phonograph hackers to Auto-Tune and the “playback speed” setting on YouTube. With an ensemble of coauthors, he is writing The Sound of AI: Audio, Culture, and the Politics of Machine Learning. Visit his website at https://sterneworks.org

.​.​.​and this is my voice from Cancerscapes by Jonathan Sterne

Event is free and open to the public.

ASL and live captions will be provided.

Please email accessibility needs as they relate to this event to msf440@nyu.edu.

 Co-sponsored by CuteLab NYC, nothing to say press, Proclaiming Disability Arts.

Register here