About

This practice-based interdisciplinary research approaches captioning as vibrant, critical material for art practice. Poetic captioning renders video accessible to d/Deaf audiences through ‘thick’ translations of sound and affect: ‘corrective, cacophonous, comical’ (Watlington, 2019). I will explore how artists’ strategies trouble the systemic ableism of ‘Visual’ Arts. How does re-orientating audio-visual cultures towards ‘expansive publics’ (Lazard 2019) necessitate formally innovative captioning methodologies rooted within disabled, queer, working-class, feminist and black poetics? Can captioning agitate hierarchies in image-making? Drawing on disabled artists’ vital work, I will develop videos considering integrated captioning with access consultants.
 
Closed captions can be toggled on and off and are considered a film’s metadata: information about data that isn’t the data itself. A core provocation is testing captioning’s potential for ‘queering metadata.’ Ahmed (2019, p. 198) proposes Queer Use as ‘improper’ use, or ‘re-use’ for new purposes; ‘To queer use is to [...] bring to the front what ordinarily recedes into the background.’ To queer captions is to re-prioritise what is predominantly afterthought in post-production. What happens when captioning is brought to the forefront as a generative apparatus for artists’ filmmaking rather than a form of metadata? 
 
My films focus on the library assistant, a metadata specialist, tasked with access as service-provision, digitising reading-lists. I will employ my knowledge as a librarian to develop ‘administrator methodologies,’ repurposing collection management towards situated filmmaking. Resisting the discovery-centric architectures of The Library as a knowledge system, and the colonial reverb of admin, I ask what formations captioning can occupy against capture?
 
I will caption touch, taste and smell as vocabularies that animate multisensory forms of listening. Through videos, installation, performance, workshops and interdisciplinary writing, I will develop queer methods that prioritise captioning as an organising force within filmmaking: ‘queer captioning,’ a tool which recalibrates video attuning to a multiplicity of bodies.