Cripping with Slow AI: Reflections on My Work as Intersectional Design Specialist with the CripTech AI Lab
When I joined the CripTech AI Lab as the intersectional design specialist, I stepped into a familiar terrain: a justice-rooted creative community experimenting with technologies that were never built for us. Since 2022, I’ve collaborated with the CripTech Incubator on projects exploring VR, haptics, digital exhibitions, and hybrid publishing. Every lab has been an exercise in reimagining who technology serves and how disabled wisdom reshapes the world. The 2025 CripTech AI Lab continued that lineage—an ambitious virtual incubator that asked disabled artists to not only critique artificial intelligence, but alter it, inhabit it, and rebuild it from inside our own crip knowledges.
My role moved across every layer of the project. As part of the design team, I helped shape the structure of the lab months before the cohort assembled. I participated in the conversations that set the tone for access, experimentation, community care, and artist support. I helped select the artists—an international group of disabled makers whose practices span machine learning, sound art, speculative design, prosthetics, video, poetry, biofeedback systems, and more. And once the lab began, I was present for every gathering: supporting the cohort, modeling collaborative feedback practices, and offering access-centered guidance as artists built entirely new relationships with AI.
Honoring Alice Wong: The Origin Point of My CripTech Journey
My path into the CripTech ecosystem began with an invitation from someone whose impact on disability culture is immeasurable: Alice Wong. During the first CripTech exhibition, Alice was not feeling well and asked me to step in for her on the public panel. That single moment of trust and selection changed the shape of my creative future. It was there that I first met M Eilo—whose work was being exhibited—and curators Vanessa and Lindsey. All the outcomes I have produced with the CripTech Incubator, and now with the CripTech AI Lab, grew from that first connection that Alice made possible.
Alice’s choice opened a portal for me—one of relationship, recognition, and responsibility. It is fitting that the exhibition website begins with her words after her death, anchoring the program in the clarity and depth of her vision:
“Disability is a portal, a way of focusing our gaze and sharpening our lens on the intricacies of our humanity.”
—Alice Wong, 1974–2025
Her quote now stands as a guiding star for the incubator, a reminder that disabled creativity is not a sidebar to technology but a central lens for reading, revising, and remaking the world. My work in this lab is part of the lineage Alice cultivated: a lineage of crip wisdom, community brilliance, and accessible futures imagined in collaboration rather than extraction.
As with all my work, I integrated a layer of disability justice across the process. This meant ensuring access was not a bolt-on feature but a foundational design principle—something that shaped the pedagogy, the communication protocols, the workshop norms, and the virtual spaces where we met. It also meant supporting artists as whole people, not just as producers of content for an emerging field hungry for “innovation.” Disabled innovation has always been with us; the lab simply created conditions for it to flourish.
Throughout the fall, I provided ongoing feedback, facilitated connection among participants, and served as a thought partner to both the cohort and the lead artist, M Eilo (BlinkPopShift). As a guest speaker, I presented on CripTEKnoscience—our lineage of disabled technological making, remixing, hacking, and refusal—and shared insights from my own evolving AI practice, including questions about data sovereignty, cultural preservation, creative agency, and non-extractive technological design.
The CripTech AI Lab itself is a powerful model for how disabled-led communities can remake computational spaces. Over its four-month cycle, the lab held artist talks, technical and conceptual workshops, collaborative sessions, and deep one-on-one advising. Participants built their own datasets, learned about model architectures, created personal tools, critiqued commercial systems, and developed prototype artworks that foreground access—from captions to audio description to alternative sensory interfaces. The program culminated in a public panel review and a virtual exhibition showcasing each artist’s work.
The incubator continues the broader mission of the Leonardo CripTech program: an international platform for disability innovation that includes residencies, publications, hybrid events, and educational spaces where disabled artists reimagine creative technologies on our own terms. CripTech understands access not as accommodation, but as an institutional and cultural practice—something I’ve helped steward across multiple labs, exhibitions, and organizational partnerships.
This year, under M Eilo’s leadership, the cohort intentionally slowed AI down. They treated computation not as a race to scale but as a communal act of deceleration. Artists built local models instead of relying on far-off data centers. They used decades-old cellular automata techniques alongside more recent machine learning systems. They trained algorithms on their own archives: personal writing, paintings, recordings—even medical data. They created not speed but spaciousness, choosing the limping, irregular pace where crip wisdom thrives.
As M wrote in their artist statement, “We weeded out expectations of speed… slowing ourselves and our algorithms down to the irregular, limping pace where conversation, collaboration, and crip culture thrive.” The projects that emerged feel like stones placed on a path, inviting others to move at their own pace—pause, reflect, rest, reconsider, remake.
My experience with the AI Lab is part of a longer journey: reorienting creative technology toward justice-based community building rather than extraction. Disabled artists have always built technology—through necessity, through improvisation, through collective survival. The CripTech AI Lab simply provided infrastructure for us to do that work together, internationally, with intention and care.
Supporting this lab reaffirmed a fundamental truth: when disabled people lead technological experimentation, we make tools that expand agency, deepen creativity, and strengthen community power. We build futures where access is not a constraint but a generative force. We shift the narrative from hype to humanity. We craft spaces where artists can resist, repair, and reimagine the algorithm.
And we do it by moving at the speed of crip brilliance: slow, relational, rigorous, and free.
Guest Peaker Claudia Alick CripTech AI Lab
claudia alick presenting on her art practice and artfical intelligence