Text, Technology, Time Bent: Cripping Access with Jay Afrisando and Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner

Abstract

This essay focuses on the crip aesthetics of Time Bent, Folded, Exhausted (henceforth Time Bent), a co-authored work of literature/sound art by Jay Afrisando and Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner. In this collaborative, multimedia project, the two neurodivergent artists stage a dialogic process of thinking and writing focusing on their experience of temporality, especially as it relates to their artistic practice. As crip time becomes creative fodder, perception is rendered multisensory and multimodal. Textual and staging choices invite audience members to immerse themselves in neurodivergent temporalities and to question ableist expectations around time, work, and social interactions. The piece also reimagines the relationship between access, time, and space through its innovative use of technology, both in the time of composition and that of the performance. I argue in this essay that the intertwining of the textual, the technological, and the performative in Time Bent demonstrates that access is not so much a logistical matter as a relational one. The performance shifts attention from accessibility features to the more relational—and thus, temporal—conception of “access intimacy” rooted in disability justice.