Read and listen to Louise Hickman’s new text on LUX artist Jordan Lord’s work, now on our website.
This New Artist Focus essay considers Lord’s embedded access-building practice, offering insight into how captioning and audio description operate as practical, aesthetic and political forms within a wider disability arts context.
As Hickman writes: “Lord’s work is a pooling of resources that has both an aesthetic and narrative strategy. Their filmmaking practice builds captioning and audio description into their filmmaking. This commitment, present across Lord’s work, challenges the tendency to treat disability as an object of documentation, narrowly focusing on the symptoms of sickness and disability through a medical lens.”
Read via the link in our bio.
Jordan Lord’s work is distributed through LUX. To view, enquire via our website. Their exhibition ‘Narrative Warfare’ featuring their most recent work ‘Concealed and Denied’ is on at LUX until 31st May.
Image 1: Shared Resources, 2021
Image 2: After… After… (Access), 2018
Image 3: After… After… (Access), 2018
All images courtesy of the artist.
@jrd_lord@louhicky #JordanLord #LouiseHickman #NewArtistFocus
Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin UK book tour is a wrap! A big thank you to Kelsie Acton, Marie Sepulchre, Louise Hickman, and Nancy Salem for hosting and being in discussion with us at the University of London, University of Leeds, and University of Cambridge!
22 April 2026 | 10 AM - 12 PM PT | Virtual via Zoom
Access Intelligence brings together artists, researchers, and technologists working at the intersection of disability and AI. Together, they will examine what disabled people already know as theorists and builders of intelligence, and to imagine what building with that knowledge could look like. Featuring M Eilo, Joshua Miele, Louise Hickman, Lindsey Felt, and Claudia Alick.
This event will have ASL interpretation and CART captioning.
RSVP today at our Link in bio!
This symposium is made possible with support from @weareabilitycentral and the @fordfoundation
Exciting news: This week, I officially began my new four-year project titled “Algorithmic Kitchen: Recipes for Disability-Led Health Technology Design,” funded by the Wellcome Trust.
As lead PI, I’ll be working with an incredible team at the University of Cambridge and beyond to explore how disabled people’s lived experiences can reframe the design of health technologies.
Through disability-led co-design, storytelling experiments (Friction Fiction), and creative installations (Algorithmic Kitchen), we’re developing participatory “recipes” for more just, accessible tech—rooted in interdependence, care, and the wisdom of disabled communities.
This project challenges conventional models of innovation, making space for access work as expertise, and for technology to be shaped by those most often excluded from its design.
Stay tuned for updates from our co-design labs, research kitchens, and more.
In 2009, @spescks wrote: "It's the death of public education Louise, stop being so delighted" Photo taken at UC Berkeley when the UC system raised tuition by 33%. There were other more seriously looking faces, but not captured, honestly.
It's thrilling to see a collaboration come together in print form.
Criptörök is a small collection of fiction that looks to understand the essential role of access workers within the digital space.
Criptorok is coined by @jenny.chamarette and connects to @gleem0trix work to access in exciting ways.
It was so generative to find opportunities to use fiction to think more about policy work, an unlikely dual, and it's working!
Head over to @granduniongallery for a free copy of the text. There are only 100 copies available and free (excluding postage).
The book looks at the labour of transcribers, captioners, and on-demand workforces, like mechanical Turks, the work challenges the assumption that accessibility happens behind the scenes and delves into the histories and futures of access work to understand the potential harms and injuries.
Includes:
An Eternal Amanuensis by Jo Linsay Walton
Criptörök by @jenny.chamarette
Printed by @holodeckbirmingham
In collaboration with @_hannah_wallis and supported by @granduniongallery@mctdcambridge and Digital Futures on Work.
Massive shout-out to @katalienane for feedback
Image description: White booklet on white background. The text on the booklet is a snippet of the book cover with the following dictionary's definition:
Criptörök ( /kɹˈɪptˈʊɹˈʊk/ ) n. v. adj.
1a. n. A neologism describing part-mechanical, part-human collaborations designed to complete digital tasks at speed, requestable anywhere at any time. Derives from crip n. disability justice; crypto adj. associated with digital online transactions; and Turk, Török (n.) or turking (v.) freelance digital labour providing short-term high-volume tasks to meet global demand.
1b. n. “A crowdworking platform on an innovative cooperative model offering real-time AI-driven occupational assessment and adjustments” 2023. An Eternal Amanuensis, J. Walton.
I couldn't resist a summer classic taken in Edinburgh. It's the early 80s, I was an authority on cutting roses, and it took convincing we shouldn't pick every flower in the garden. ID: There are three people, my mum, granny and myself wearing an assortment of pastel colours. Mum and Granny have their hands on their left hip. Looking exasperated. 🌸💮🌹
My first in person event (in a long) at Trinity Hall. On the way out, I got stuck in the elevator and thankfully @jere_moi and @irenegalandra were on hand with the champagne waiting. The image shows diy ramps to get me out the last part. This is AFTER being stuck inside!
I'm feeling pretty rubbish today. BUT I got my first dose of the Oxford vaccine yesterday!! Now it's everyone else turn so we can get back to being social humans again.
Caption written by @shanfinnegan One of the things that has made 2020 bearable is collaborative projects including working with @louhicky and a CART provider named Jennifer on this short video “Captioning on Captioning.” Our friend @kgotkin ’s tweet about it is such a wonderful description of the project: “a rare chance to better understand how real-time captions work. And why the relationships that produce them are so precious and complex.” It’s screening on @luxmovingimage ’s website through March (link in bio). There is no audio description currently — as we were thinking about audio description of captioning, we realized we wanted to restructure the narrative of the film for the AD version. It’s still in the works — hopefully to be released in January.
Image descriptions:
1. A screen grab of stenography software. The captions currently on the screen read, “Okay. I think we are ready to go.” Above is the date 10-19-2020 and below is the phonetic shorthand Jennifer used to type the caption.
2. A title card that appears in the film. In my handwriting it says, “Captioning is access work.” At the beginning are two greater than symbols, which I think are typically used in captions to represent a new speaker or topic.
