reflection-by-nat-decker.md

OSACC Reflection

Nat Decker

I began this reflection from an artist residency in rural Wisconsin where I got very little work done, preferring instead to watch tree leaves blow in the wind. It’s difficult to embrace pauses under the pressure of an accelerant schedule. This summer was a pause year for the residency (ACRE) itself, in which former staff and artists participated in 3 days of workshops on cooperative leadership structures and organizational accountability. I absorbed the lessons in anticipation of the many ways these ideas would reverberate out into all our lives, taken with us to other projects, blooming into new forms. The Open Source Arts Contributor Conference felt of a similar convergence, considering the accumulations and blossoming of concepts and values we bring with us when we travel to and from such meetings. I’m left with the weighty feeling of importance of these spaces in which we briefly alter the rhythm of our usual lives to create a union, practice openness, share, collaborate, participate, build, have intention. And how what is generated in those spaces ripples out and in all directions.

OSACC was my first conference. It’s nice when someone emails you a web form and it amounts to something so tangible and significant. I tend to feel imposter syndrome, especially in academic spaces, so I found it incredibly validating to be both invited and supported with travel and accommodations. Even so, I arrived questioning my place there. I have a habit of saying I am not a coder. In part, this describes a limit of expertise, but also speaks to insecurities and perhaps my confused criticality of occupying a tech space. I’m learning to challenge that non- coder designation, reminding myself that using software is using shrouded code, that I have coded, and that it doesn’t matter. Considering what it means to be a contributor, I want to resist the politics of expertise. During my days at OSACC, I was invited to contribute. I was welcomed at the table in dynamic ways which resisted the narrowness of technical skill or institutional affiliation. The technology was a medium around which so much more - people, care, community, generosity, dreaming - rotated.

One of my more structured contributions was assisting in facilitation of a guided discussion on accessibility. I collaborated with Qianqian Ye, Bobby Joe Smith III, Sammie Veeler, and Lauren Mitchell. Most of us had met previously within the world of p5.js and access, and this was an opportunity to open those discussions to the conference group. My breakout topic was ‘Creative Access,’ to which I brough my experience as a disabled artist and access worker. The conversations were initiated with a consideration of how we define access. My group went on to discuss the important of access as a foundation to any design process, how artists are using creativity and poetics to expand understandings and aesthetics of access, queer Korean Sign Language, VR haptics, and the nuances of promoting access while also ensuring boundaries of community safety and intent.

I was additionally invited into a working group tasked with revising the p5.js Community Statement, Code of Conduct, and Access Statement. It was invigorating to witness a group of people, each bringing their own unique experiences, parse out the granular details and

meanings within succinct sequences of words. But this also gave us space for bigger conversations about how we ground these words and leverage them as meaningful frameworks for the whole of the project. Tristan Espinoza posed an important question of how we honor, credit, can meaningfully interact with the historic movement that have contributed to the language and concepts being employed in these statements. I am remembering this question, and all that was discussed in this group, as I continue my own research and work on access with the Processing Foundation.

As a final presentation, my collaborator - Cielo Saucedo- and I had an opportunity to share a brief presentation of our project – Cripping_CG. Cripping_CG is a collective investigating the intersections of disability and computer graphics through research, projects, and a collaborative digital asset library. The project provides a platform to analyze digital creative tools and conventions through a disability lens, identifying inaccessibilities, ableist stereotypes, historical relevance, and create room for a more expansive disability aesthetic within media arts and cultural archiving.

On the last night of the conference, I relished in some queer joy when a group of us partied at a local lesbian bar. I was recently in my hometown of Chicago and had the chance to catch a gorgeous drag show at Berlin - a longstanding gay club in the neighborhood I was born in and a place my gay moms partied at in the 80s. I had a moment looking at the walls, imagining how their material is imbued with history. How these spaces protect and nourish resistance and become nodes through which so many lives pass. A conference effectively creates a space bringing many disparate people together, and I’m interested in how the temporary improvised format can effectively respond to the chaotic and impermanent nature of our reality. But how can we meaningfully support the reverberations into our individual communities and create lasting space? What more can we do to make something like OSACC a safer, more supportive convening?

I will continue to reflect on what it means to be a contributor and the importance of creating these spaces to conference. I am thankful for the contributions of all who attended and supported, including the children who were playing and sleeping and spilling food on the floor as we ate from the lush buffet, the beautiful art in the “Young Gifted and Black” gallery show downstairs, the workers who prepared the rooms we occupied, our food, the electricity we used to power our devices. I’ll also considering what it means to bring open source ideology to the politic of my everyday, practicing radical openness and sharing, and organizing in defiance to the illogic within our world. Thanks, OSACC.