Join us for a screening of the film Invisible Machines. There will be a Q&A with director Yelena Gluzman immediately following the screening.
Bringing together histories of feminized labor with ethnographic scenes of stenographers captioning for d/Deaf students in the classroom, this experimental film considers how captioners and their clients make sense of demands for invisibility, neutrality, and access. Formally, by interrupting the normative coherence of sound and image, Invisible Machines reflexively undermines the fluency of its own audio track to make palpable the nuanced interpretive work that goes into transcribing across modalities.
Yelena Gluzman is an interdisciplinary scholar and experimental theater director and filmmaker. Her work draws on feminist STS, critical disability studies, ethnomethodology, and distributed cognition. Her recent projects investigate how "other minds" are staged in laboratory experiments (Cognitive Neuroscience and the Experimental Theater of Other Minds, 2021), and trace the distributed communication ecologies of captioners who transcribe in real time for d/Deaf and Hard-of-hearing students (Stenoforms of Life, in progress). Her publications contribute to discussions on performance as research (PaR) and consider the promises of experimental reflexivity and 'research as theater' (RaT). She is a founding editor at Ugly Duckling Presse, an independent nonprofit publisher of poetry, performance, translation and artist books, and founding editor of Emergency Index: An Annual Compendium of Performance Practice, currently in its 10th volume. She is assistant professor of science, technology, and society studies in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta.
