Sylvia Lee | Potential of Limitation: A Look through Accessibility

 
There are works about disability recreating the social restriction on disabled bodies to better understand disabilities, or addressing more clinical aspects of solving problems of impairment. While these serve a great purpose in raising awareness about disabilities, discussion about disabled experiences can also provide an original perspective in understanding our environment. Acknowledging the different experiences allows us to understand the diversity of not only abilities but also people. Potential of Limitation is a practice to visualize such diversity with a focus on limitations on accessibility of a physical space.
Drawing from the convention of artworks hung at “average” eye level of “expected” audience being inaccessible for wheelchair users, Potential of Limitation sets moveable space as below the standard wheelchair height of 36’’ (91.4 cm). Such constraints situate the biped audience to unfamiliar body positions and movements. The lights on the hat device leave a light trajectory along the user’s movements which are captured with long exposure photography. The results of this trajectory are processed into two different forms: 1) A picture with low illumination that focuses on the light trajectory 2) A picture with a higher illumination that captures the body position in movement. The former is a record of different artistic expressions while the latter is a collection of data about unconventional bodily movements. These pictures can be viewed on a big standing screen, which are displayed when the viewer fits into a sitting position without a physical chair. This forces the participants to a perspective of a wheelchair user of looking up to the screen, and simulates the physical strain of trying to access information that is not designed for them.
By restricting the spatial freedom and accessibility of information, this project leads the participants to get a taste of physically disabling experience. This experience is not confined to only discomfort, but instead becomes the initiative for a creative production. The combination of these two recognizes disability and its potential as an innovative perspective, bringing the able-bodied to consider disability as not lack of ability, but a different ability.