Memes:
@hot.crip [c.2018] an ongoing critical theory and access advocacy project
sharing low-barrier comedic visuals. The memes function as contemporary
propaganda, graffiti tags, or visual theory-diagrams designed to circulate
quickly and informally, without the pretension of art-for-art’s-sake.
The memes use humour, and hyperbole as critical tools, not literal statements
leveraging distortion to expose ableist logics and social contradictions.
The Dadaist method is intentionally anti-refined and low-stakes, accessible to viewers of all ages, and supports a digital community.
Slapstick functions as a form of counter-propaganda, the project looks at ableism,
myth and digital culture through a visual language that moves quickly and widely.
the memes create a fast, accessible pathway into disability politics and
conceptual thinking outside academic and art-world contexts,
while sustaining a community rooted in advocacy,
humour, and shared experience.
Each meme was created on a phone with the constraint of being written, completed and shared live within 5–15 minutes. This constraint reduced writer fatigue and avoided unnecessary perfectionism or aestheticization, centering access-immediacy. The speed and simplicity of the process supported wide circulation.
The @hot.crip account was launched in parallel to @paid.technologies, and @disabled_personals, each presented anonymously so the projects could be engaged without attaching it to my practice.
As the communities expanded, I dislosed authorship on all 3 accounts, roughly 1 year later, to shed light on multiplicity.
Authorship anonymity was a way to stage the complexity of disabled life through humour, celebration, the invisibility/visibility paradox of disclosure politics. Sharing my name to the accounts connected the cakes, memes, sculpture, and intentional access design system, so the projects could remain transparent.
A total of 400+ memes include full image descriptions as part of an ongoing
commitment to digital equity and multisensory access access points.
‘memetics’ coined by Richard Dawkins, frames memes as cultural copyable materials that evolve through repetition and variation, similar to genetic processes, mutating, and persististing via social transmission.
One meme from the project was cited by the Cooper Hewitt,
Smithsonian Design Museum in a 2020 essay on digital equity and crisis-access.
The museum used the work as an example of disability-led online
practices shaping institutional approaches
to alt text and digital access.
Smithsonian Design Museum in a 2020 essay on digital equity and crisis-access.
The museum used the work as an example of disability-led online
practices shaping institutional approaches
to alt text and digital access.
https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2020/05/11/forming-meaning-through-our-most-personal-sense-copy