Send message to Author

Short abstract

This paper examines hydrosexual performance-making as an ASTS collaboration where accessibility becomes creative, relational labour. Through crip technoscience and disabled ecologies, it reframes the Baltic Sea as a more-than-human collaborator in situated knowledge production.

Long abstract

Presentation (theoretical–empirical paper) with openness to dialogue with the workshop and reflection sessions

This presentation contributes to Art, Science and Technology Studies (ASTS) by examining accessibility as a form of creative and relational labour within collaborative performance-making. Drawing on an ongoing artistic research project, "The Baltic Sea’s Divorce from Toxic Humanity", the presentation analyzes how hydrosexual performance operates as a third epistemic space in which queer feminist posthumanism, disability studies, and brackish (blue) humanities intersect with artistic and technological practices.

Rather than treating accessibility as a technical add-on, the project conceptualizes access as an intimate, processual, and epistemological condition of collaboration. Bringing together hydrofeminism, crip technoscience, and disability aesthetics, the presentation explores how concepts such as disabled ecologies, access intimacy, and wet cripistemology actively shape the making of a multisensory, more-than-human performance. In this framework, the Baltic Sea functions not as a backdrop or object of representation, but as an injured yet agential collaborator whose material conditions co-produce the performance’s aesthetic, ethical, and infrastructural design.

The presentation engages directly with ASTS concerns around boundary work, showing how accessibility practices blur distinctions between art, environmental knowledge, care infrastructures, and performance technologies. It argues that cripped hydrosexual performance generates situated, inclusive knowledge by foregrounding vulnerability, interdependence, and damaged environments as productive sites of collaboration rather than problems to be solved.

By framing accessibility as creative collaboration across human and nonhuman actors, the paper proposes hydrosexual performance as an ASTS methodology for imagining resilient, more-than-now futures grounded in care, relationality, and collective responsibility.