Open Call: Leonardo CripTech AI Lab 2027

A virtual creative incubator that utilizes community-driven digital and new media art projects to engage, critique and reimagine the relationship between disability and artificial intelligence.

Leonardo CripTech Incubator is an art and technology program for disability innovation.  Encompassing labs, workshops, fellowships, presentations, publication, and education, this innovation incubator is a community platform for disabled artists to engage and remake creative technologies through the lens of accessibility. Employing a broad understanding of technologies, including prosthetic tools, neural networks, software, and the built environment, CripTech Incubator reimagines enshrined notions of how a body-mind can move, look, communicate.

The rapid development and integration of artificial intelligence into many technical, social, and cultural systems has exposed the technology’s intrinsic faultlines. Much deserved critique has highlighted how AI can reiterate existing race and gender biases; this lab will explore the logics of ableism that also underpin many AI frameworks. AI applications, even when designed to be assistive, can sometimes amplify culturally dominant standards of “normal” and “ability.” What new paradigms might emerge when disabled creatives contribute to the creation and applications of machine learning? Disabled artists working with AI can help chart a path for algorithmic futures where disabled people’s ways of knowing and being are valued.

CripTech AI Lab recasts AI as access intelligence: the tools, materials, and cultural processes of making access. A counterpoint to prevailing understandings of AI as disembodied machine logic built on norms and averages, access intelligence exposes AI’s biases and absences, offering a creative opening for new crip structures and programs. The lab is guided by three values — Interdependence, Play, and Wayfinding — which emerged from recent design workshops with our disabled community of artists, technologists, educators, researchers, and cultural organizers. These values serve as shared frameworks for the lab, informing both individual artistic practice and collective inquiry.

Through a series of workshops, participants will build greater fluency in AI and access tools, explore emerging methods in media art, and deepen their engagement with disability culture. Each workshop topic is paired with a mini project that offers participants the opportunity to practice technical skills and develop creative and conceptual applications of access intelligence within their own practice. Scaffolded across the four months of the lab, these microprojects build toward two interconnected outcomes: an individual artistic project and a collective community resource.

Each participant will develop an individual artwork, supported by one-on-one advising with lead artist M Eilo and presented in a culminating virtual showcase. Alongside this work, participants will document their experiments as recipes (some failed, some promising) for how disabled communities navigate through, outside, or alongside algorithmic systems toward interdependence, play, and wayfinding. Each recipe will include ingredients, such as relationships and materials; tools, such as access techniques or AI models; and the steps that bring them together. Collectively, these recipes will form a website: a living archive of access intelligence. Extending beyond the lab, the archive will serve as a resource for disabled creatives and the broader field, and as community-generated knowledge that can inform how AI tools, institutions, and policies account for disabled people's ways of knowing and being. Participants will be credited as co-authors and will determine what is shared publicly.

This virtual lab spans a 4-month period that includes

• Creative, technical and conceptual workshops

• Guest speakers (scholars, artists, creative technologists)

• Individual project development

• One-on-one project review and advising sessions with the lead artist

• Interdependent co-creation of a community archive alongside other disabled creatives

• A culminating virtual showcase, and the launch of the co-authored archive

Participants will develop a deeper understanding of AI as a culturally situated technology with the goal of being able to articulate their unique relationship to AI as disabled artists and the future of AI for all.

The previous CripTech AI Lab culminated in the virtual exhibition, Slow AI.

Lead Artist

CripTech AI Lab will be led by artist M Eilo (BlinkPopShift). M Eilo uses castoffs, computers and community to explore disability as a hotbed of innovation. M is best known for their computational prosthetics including Prosthetic Memory, a homemade AI built to offset the artists long term memory loss, and Masking Machine, a wearable computer which automatically masks the artist’s face and simulates eye contact in social interactions. Some of M’s past work include: Prosthetic Memory(link is external), AI Acne(link is external), Masking Machine, Performance, Masking Machine, Photography Series, Visually Similar.

The AI hype train has derailed. We know all about the environmental impacts, the stolen data, and the sheer boring slop. But is it the algorithms? Or is it the billionaires controlling them? And what happens when artists play puppeteer, shaping AI not for growth, not for profit, but for personal agency, creative discovery, and community power? - M Eilo (BlinkPopShift)

The Lab Consists of Four Activity Phases:

1. Artist Talk

A presentation by lead artist, M Eilo, introducing the participants and the public to their creative practice.

1. Workshops

Led by M Eilo, the workshop series will cover how to define project constraints that reflect community values and access needs; choose, combine and operate AI models including tools like Pinokio, ComfyUI, and VoiceStudio; and how to document processes and effectively communicate about choices and outcomes to disabled audiences. In these workshops participants will create a series of mini projects, some individually and some collaboratively.

1. Project Development

Participants prototype artworks that apply workshop skills, as well as creative access (captioning, description, etc) for these works. They will develop documentation of their process as part of the lab’s collective outcome. One-on-one sessions will enable participants to meet with the lead artist, receive feedback and guidance about their projects, and identify avenues for development.

1. Outcomes: Virtual Showcase

The lab culminates in a public virtual showcase of projects and documentation.

All meetings will be held synchronously, and we will have a space to gather and connect asynchronously. Meetings will be held weekly on Zoom, and Discord will be used for asynchronous participation

Lab activities will begin in January 2027 and run through May 2027.

Eligibility

We are seeking individuals and small groups that center disabled artistry, experience, and leadership. (For more about how we understand disability and access, see here).

Successful applicants will receive a 100% Scholarship, covering course tuition and all required course software.

We are open to applicants from anywhere around the world, the Leonardo/ISAST team and the lead artist are based in the Pacific Time Zone (PT), and all lab activities will be held between 9 AM and 5 PM PT.

Diversity

Leonardo is committed to diversity and encourages applications from BIPOC, women, the

LGBTQIA+ community, and persons with disabilities, as well as applications from researchers

and practitioners from across the spectrum of new media disciplines and methods.

Application Process

You will submit your application on the linked portal, including upload of the following in a single document (doc/docx/pdf). Feel free to use our premade template(link is external) to assist in your application:

1. Answers to the following questions, please keep responses around 150-300 words each:Briefly describe your art practice.
   Describe your background and interest in disability and access.
   Describe your interest and experience with digital tools/platforms and if/how they are integrated into your art practice.
   Describe your interest in and experience with artificial intelligence tools and technologies. All experience levels are welcome.
   We know there are ethical, environmental, and economic challenges – and potentials – caused by the use and implementation of AI. What are some interventions you are already making or hope to make?
   We want to learn more about you. What do you hope to learn and contribute to this collaboration? What communities are you part of and/or do you hope your work will reach?
   

2. 2-3 work samples either as links or uploads (No more than 5 minutes per sample). Feel free to share completed or works-in-progress related to what you’d like to work on in this lab. Please be sure links/works are accessible and permissions are set for viewing.For each work sample, please include a few sentences letting us know why these projects excite you.
   

3. Two References (Name, Title, Organization, Affiliation, Email, Phone Number). References can come from a variety of relationships, including professional contacts, colleagues, peers, or even personal friends who can speak to your character, skills, and abilities.

We will also be asking for contact details, a short bio, website, field of study, and social media. This information will be kept internal unless you wish to be included into the Leonardo member directory.

In place of a written document, applicants also have the option of submitting an audio or video response to the questions above and submitting links to work samples separately. Please keep the total time 15 minutes or under and ensure your submission is accessible via a shareable link set to public or viewable to anyone with the link (YouTube, Vimeo, Google Drive, DropBox, etc.).