Planting Disabled Futures

Project Gallery

Images from community dance/VR station participatory performance at the Duderstadt Video Performance Studio, University of Michigan, February 14th 2025, our initial proof-of-concept sharing. Below that, images from the watercolor/cyanotype design brief for the tech team: working on the edges of human/non-human image creation.

Full Project Description

Planting Disabled Futures explores virtual reality (VR) technologies with fellow disabled choreographers/film-makers/dancers, to ask questions about access, community, sensuality, environmental poetics, and the futures of queer/crip play. We play with VR techniques in community performance settings to create an immersive experience that offers disabled and non-disabled audiences opportunities to move with disabled dance artists and visualizations of future plants, engaging communally in delicious movement rituals. The focus of the project is on enjoyment and enrichment, with collaborative debugging, aesthetic access, and tech/life integration as tools toward the playful immersive community potential of VR.

Even though much progress has been made in the representation of disability and sexuality, disabled people are still rarely seen as agents of sexual creativity or as queer improvisers projecting themselves in new ways into the future. This project engages this ongoing problem by offering registers of tech play, of technologically mediated representations of disability that are not cure-based, but are sassy, affirmative, and pleasurable in interspecies engagements. We will explore environmental queer narratives, engaging unnatural plants, resiliencies and healing pleasure. We will explore a range of performance access techniques, from the integrated aesthetics of audio description and creative captioning to disability culture techniques like storytelling prompts and scores. 

How can VR allow us to celebrate difference, rather than engage in hyper-mobile fantasies of overcoming and of disembodied life? How can our disabled bodymindspirits develop non-extractive intimacies, in energetic touch, using VR as a tool toward connecting with plants, with the world, even in pain, in climate emergency, in our ongoing COVID world? 

This project aims to comprehend VR’s affordances and their gendered, racialized, classed and ableist histories, to come up with new models, and to imagine them playfully and critically in a just world and in interaction with many different people.

The project is currently using video and meditative encounters in parks and outdoor spaces to explore ways of being, working, breathing together. 

Currently in development: the full Crip Cave experience (first tech run-through in February 2025, with limited portals - next development stages: an audio-forward pathway, and hactic integration)

When audiences come to a Planting Disabled Futures installation, they enter a performance space - the Crip Cave - not just a room with a VR headset. Our experience will be set up for people with little experience with VR, so two performers will act as VR access doulas and as guides through the experience. In the crip cave space will be (depending on travel/availability) two zero gravity chairs (with two headsets), stations for audio engagement (for those people for whom VR visuals are not accessible), a stimming tent (created by moira williams), and a low-tech writing/doodling table for debriefing and engagement.

Inside the VR part of the experience, people encounter an animated 3-D tree, with multiple portals - and these portals are filled with the traces of many different disabled and mad artists - 2-D films, dances, sound poems, meditative dream journeys, and more.

Director's Note/Introduction to the Tree World (in the headset):

Welcome, dear somanaut. You are a somatic traveler in the imaginative realm of interconnected bodymindspirit space.

Welcome, dear holobiont, creature made up out of many creatures, queer relations, strange touch.

Welcome to this world of plant elders offering a disability-focused playground of movement and fantasy.

As you find your breath and orientation in this world, give thanks to the many creatures that are you. You are the bacteria in your gut. You are the living creatures that nest on your skin. We are all interdependent assemblages.

Our tree world is made of similarly multiple life forms. In this world, “disability” is part of diversity. This world’s focus is on connecting relationships, not on competitive fitness. Here, we celebrate life and its essential play, not the capitalist nature of your contribution. You, I, the tree, we all are a web of improvising relations. There is nothing to win here but contact.

Come in, and fly, and breathe, and dance, and explore the tree and its portals.

Below are glimpses of a May/June 2024 residency at the Huntington Gardens where Petra and her collaborators engaged each other, plant beings, and the world in delicious performance scores - which now fill some of the portals of our 3D tree world.

My University of Michigan Team: DMC Emerging Technologies Group

Lead Developer/Programmer: Daniel "Danny" Vincenz (he/him) is a multimedia designer and developer with the DMC Emerging Technologies Group, and a graduate of University of Michigan’s STAMPS School of Art & Design. He has ADHD and works in a variety of disciplines, ranging from graphic design, motion design, game design, 3d modeling and web development. He strives to make work that's clear, friendly, and accessible to all. In his personal work, he focuses on cute, vibrant and happy aesthetics.

Sara “Dari” Eskandari (they/them) is an extended reality software developer with the DMC Emerging Technologies Group, specializing in developing VR/AR apps for research, medical, and educational use. Graduated from University of Michigan’s STAMPS School of Art & Design with a minor in Computer Science, Dari is a passionate interdisciplinary developer, designer, and educator. Dari works to increase the accessibility of new technologies to their students while discussing the rapid and undulating effects of immersive technologies on daily life.

Stephanie O'Malley (she/her) graduated with a degree in fine art from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit Michigan. With a focus on video game development, she went on to work as a game artist for the only cross-platform video game developer in the state of Michigan - a small indie studio started by the producer of the Call of Duty series. In 2012 she began working for the University of Michigan's Digital Media Commons, where she has contributed to the development of hundreds of cutting edge research projects and educational tools leveraging XR technologies. Stephanie is now the Associate Director of the Duderstadt Center's Emerging Technologies Group, overseeing a talented group of XR developers and the University's Visualization Studio - one of the first and largest labs of its kind devoted to leveraging XR technologies in academia.

Other Collaborators:

Main Tree Space Music for the project: Mikel Mwalimu-Banks, Gregory Kage, EM Gong, Richard Anderson

Mikel Mwalimu-Banks is a Native New Yorker vocalist, musician, storyteller & teaching

artist. He is a 17-year member of Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber and a vocalist and

multi-instrumentalist with the Afro-Tronic band Digital Diaspora. A proud descendant of the Jamaica, Queens lineage of visionary musicians, Mikel Banks has performed with ground-breaking artists such as percussionists J.T. Lewis, and Kenny Martin, as well as the legendary guitarist Ronnie Drayton. Mikel was a co-founder and co-lead singer for the band Women in Love along with co-founder Greg Tate, vocalist Helga Davis, & bassist Me’Shell Ndegeocello. He has been featured in a number of indie films and videos. He lives with his wife in Harlem and together they are weathering the storm of his recent diagnosis of FSHD (a form of muscular dystrophy).

Project Dramaturg:

Alexis Riley (she/they) is a white disabled psychiatric survivor and interdisciplinary performance artist from Shawnee and Osage Land (colonial West Virginia). They currently direct The Mad Memory Project, a multi-year performance series that explores mad embodiment in and beyond archives. Alexis is a President’s Postoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.

Additional Music/Sound Development:

Rebecca Caines (she/her) is a Canadian/Australian socially-engaged creative technologies, artist and scholar from York University, Canada.  Her experiences with disability in her own life and in her family connect her to the sustaining, innovative, and powerful worlds of disability art, activism, and culture that deeply inform her worldview. She has co-created award-winning large scale community projects in sound art, performance, and digital art, with partners including Indigenous communities, families and support groups, survivors of healthcare injustices, and arts and education networks. She publishes research on art and technology in social justice, contemporary understandings of community, and the fragile promise of ethical connection through improvisation and new ways of listening.  

Haptic Object Development: 

moira williams (they/them) is a disabled Indigenous artist, curator, organizer and dreamer weaving together cross-disability justice, gatherings, and arts with Indigenous tech, eco-somatics, and queer ecologies. A lifelong environmentalist, moira’s often co-creative work leads with disability and practices of abundance by imagining “ecological intimacy” as an extension of Mia Mingus’s concept of “access intimacy”.  their weavings invite ways towards deepening our ecological relationships and understandings with the land and one another.

Critter Development, with his students at Georgia Tech:

Jason Woodworth-Hou (he/him) is a recent PhD. in Performance Studies with an emphasis on dramatic and new media from the University of Georgia. His research includes exploring digital reenactments of historical events in the geographic spaces where they were purported to occur. He currently lectures for Georgia Institute of Technology, teaching “Shakespeare…technically,” Intro. to Film, and Animation. During his time at Georgia Tech., Jason has been recruiting/training a core of young engineers, programmers, and 3D artists all interested in building virtual environments for uses in storytelling within history, dramatic arts, and film contexts. 

Additional Portal material includes work by:

Desiree Mwalimu-Banks is a Zambian-born, East Coast-raised interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her work explores somatic relationships between indigenous identity, water ecologies, and apiary culture within the framework of the sacred feminine and the African diaspora. She creates sound and video installations which reimagine the frequencies and landscapes of the archetypal feminine and its relationship to self-actualization. Desiree has partnered with individuals and communities in re-visioning embodied interdisciplinary collaborations with the natural world including Movement Research, Stanford University, Naropa University, Harvard University, CUNY, Wave Farm Radio, Manhattanville Purchase College Interfaith Studies Department, and The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute. As an ordained reverend, and Priestess of Isis, Desiree offers ritual support through the archetypal journey into the Sacred Feminine.

bree gant (she/they/slim) is an artist and thinker from the Westside of Detroit. They work in performance, film, video, and print, rooted in ritual and intimacy and a legacy of Black Queer Feminism. They spend a significant amount of time binging science fiction and fantasy, waiting for the bus, and elbow-leaning in windows.

Denise Leto (she/her) is a queer, multidisciplinary poet, dance dramaturge, writer and stroke survivor. Currently, she is poet dramaturge for the London based dance/video production “Brain Odysseys.” She was poet dramaturge with Cid Pearlman for home (Body), a film/poetry/dance installation which premiered at the Santa Cruz Art Museum and The Cultural Educational Centre Artium in Viimsi, Estonia. She recently presented work on voicing at the New Orleans Poetry festival and was featured at The Poetry Foundation.

Surabhi Naik (she/her) is a designer and poet based in India. Her creative life has taken an interdisciplinary path across architecture, documentary film, interactive media development and poetry, and is grounded in practices of care and world-building. Naik’s affiliations and collaborations span organizations in New York City, including Culture Push, Works on Water, Equity Design Inc, and Parsons, as well as Alotnesse Studio and Urban Design Research Institute Mumbai. Most recently, she was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and received the Wingword Poetry Prize 2024. Naik earned her MA in Media Studies at The New School in New York City.

Nush Agarwal (they/them) is a multimedia artist. They are currently a student of Temple University, pursuing an MS of Music Technology. They create electronic and acoustic music for audiovisual works, and explore aspects of sensory immersion and meditation in their work. Additionally, they are a passionate 'ukulelist, dedicated to both performing and teaching the instrument to spread the joy of music. Outside of music, Nush holds disability justice work close to their heart.

People Who Helped Visioning the Project 

Cynthia Ling Lee is a Taiwanese American interdisciplinary artist who creates embodied art rooted in crip, queer, and feminist of color praxis. She is curious about long-hauling as an alternate embodied training that contradicts dance's ableism, the anti-capitalist wisdom of mosses, the delicate strength of crip care webs, and embodied art that departs from “the show must go on” urgency of theatrical production. Their work has been presented internationally at venues including Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Kuandu Arts Festival (Taipei), and Chandra-Mandapa: Spaces (Chennai). Cynthia is an associate professor of Performance, Play and Design at UC Santa Cruz.

Kym McDaniel (she/her) is an experimental filmmaker, interdisciplinary collaborator, choreographer, curator, and performer. Her films have recently screened in solo and two-person screenings at UnionDocs, Mills Foley Microcinema, Cellular Cinema, Rhizome DC, and the Society for Disability Studies Conference, as well as in group exhibitions at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance, and Superfest Disability Film Festival, among others. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Dance Film and Digital Technologies within the Dance Department at The Ohio State University.

The Planting Disabled Futures Project is supported by the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Fellowship, with funds provided by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Surdna Foundation, and Democracy Fund.