NEA Tech Check: Claudia Alick of Calling Up Justice

This NEA interview series will take you on a journey across the nation to learn how leaders in the arts and cultural field are approaching the intersections of technology, culture, and society. Inspired by findings from the NEA arts and technology field scan conducted in partnership with Knight Foundation and Ford Foundation, we aim to increase public awareness of creative approaches to technology that engage local communities, explore ethical issues, and increase digital skills through the arts. Here is our conversation with Claudia Alick, founder of Calling Up Justice.

NEA: Tell us about yourself.

CLAUDIA ALICK: I am a Black queer disabled performer, producer, writer, intersectional inclusion expert, digital artist, user experience director, and founder of Calling Up Justice, an active network of cultural producers, tech workers, artists, social justice activists who build and facilitate digital spaces for co-working and meaning-making around disability, racial and gender justice. I served as co-president of the board of Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) for seven years, an advisor for Howlround Theater Commons and the NEFA National Theater Project, and actively provide consulting services for funders and organizations across the nation. Public speaking highlights include Disability + Pleasure Activism hosted by Disability Visibility Project and Integrated Community Services with adrienne maree brown, AI for the People: Black in 2042, and The Smithsonian Afrofuturism Series: Claiming Space, A Symposium on Black Futures.

My current projects include Accessible Virtual Pride, Why Mask Portland, and serving as a curator and access doula with the Leonardo CripTech Incubator, an art and technology fellowship for disability innovation, and the CripTech Metaverse Lab, a collaboration between Leonardo, The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST), and Gray Area (San Francisco, CA).

(Editor’s note: The findings from the CripTech Metaverse Lab are published in a special issue of the Leonardo/ISAST journal, Criptech and the Art of Access, and can also be found in the CripTech archive.)

NEA: How would you describe your organization?

ALICK: Calling Up Justice operates like an interdependent forest system that thrives through mutual support and diverse participation. Our members come from a wide range of economic realities, some needing to balance their income with state benefits due to disability, while others engage in more traditional capitalist work. In many ways, we function like the underground networks found in forests and plant communities, where mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic relationships with plant roots. These rhizomatic structures connect individual plants, allowing them to share resources and communicate about their environment. Much like these natural systems, we benefit from mutual exchange, where all participants contribute to and gain from the network in unique ways.

We are cultural producers, tech workers, artists, social justice activists. We publish and share content and resources on justice. We build and facilitate digital spaces for co-working and meaning making. We provide consultations to individuals and institutions. We serve on several governance and advisory boards and support individuals, foundations and institutions with facilitation. We produce transmedia and phygital events: creative, social, educational and business. We organize and participate in think-tanks, study groups, and peer exchange groups. We envision new paths to organize and produce outside of colonized ways. We also consult, staff, and design online and in-person events and shows. Our work is live and asynchronous. We love the hybrid as well as the purely digital or physical. We build and facilitate connections. Disability, Racial and Gender Justice fuel our work.

NEA: Why is this work important to you?

ALICK: This has always been about accessibility and connectivity for me. As a child raised in a small predominantly White town, I used the best technology for me to access the ideas that were not in my local community. My record albums allowed me to listen to Stevie Wonder, and VHS cassette tapes let me watch Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun starring Danny Glover. Books allowed me to time travel and get inspired by Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Ntozake Shange. Growing up in a low-income household, we didn’t get the chance to travel a lot or even have regular long-distance phone calls. We valued low-cost public solutions to connecting to community and culture in the broader world. Letter writing, libraries, museums, and watch parties have always been a vital piece of my practice, and I started saying yes to digital connectivity tools as soon as they were available.

Sharing short pieces of text, video, and voice, playing and programming games and digital spaces, and using what was available to the public is central to the work I produce in the world. Our stories inspire and help us to understand who we were and what we are capable of. Being able to access, exchange information, and be a part of these stories is part of what makes you feel like you are in the world. I often say, “they took our drums and use them to reinforce our chains” to acknowledge the ways supremacy culture used cultural appropriation and the arts to propagandize oppressed peoples. As marginalized people it is more important now than ever to control our data and use it to build our collective futures.

NEA: What are ways in which you have experienced arts and technology activities contributing to the wellbeing of individuals and communities?

ALICK: We use arts and technology to connect us across time and space and difference for life-affirming cultural exchange. For example, we produced our first Accessible Virtual Pride event last year and heard from participants that some of them had never been able to attend a pride event in person before because they came out during the pandemic.

Another example is when we relaunched Dis/Rep, a disability-led peer education space where we explored empowering texts in an ultra accessible format. Because it is led by disabled practitioners who use technology in our artistic and professional practices, we are serving as a model for others to build accessible and positive digital spaces. We’ve received feedback from outside organizations that are making changes in the ways they manage virtual meetings and design digital spaces inspired by our practice. We also share the program asynchronously so people can visit at any time to access the wealth of our work. 

To get a little more specific with just one example of how Dis/Rep uses technology, we have a separate Google Meet account for our sign language interpretation team that is active inside our Zoom meeting and also integrated via Open Broadcast System (OBS). This allows the human who is helping manage the team to clearly communicate and for our Deaf participants to have a seamless experience inside the live event and in the recording.
We’re creating spaces for people to grow their power and ungaslight themselves from dominant ableist culture.

NEA: How are you cultivating awareness of ethical issues and societal implications around technology?

ALICK: We reckon with the legacy of a country where most of our technologies were developed through some kind of stolen labor and inequitable resourcing. There’s a reason why Calling Up Justice has a tech co-op and tries to reuse technology. We understand the cost of the human labor it takes to create the tools we use. We also have been reading books like Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble, and we followed Timnit Grebu, co-founder of Black in AI, when we were concerned about the ethics of artificial intelligence and witnessed her ouster from Google. We belong to Mastodon servers on AI ethics and watch livestreams like Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.
 
We’re always looking at the social justice implications in design and staffing for the various technologies we use. For example, with Followers Forever, we are holding free digital media literacy and open design sessions to learn how social media impacts us [marginalized creators] and how to empower ourselves. We also train as many as possible in our Rapid Response Tech Team Bootcamps and hold virtual peer exchange forums on topics such as Producing in Pandemic and Dis/Rep [Disability/Representation]. We are growing capacities in our communities. This is necessary for equity.

NEA: How are you exploring the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) or advancing public awareness or understanding of the responsible use of AI in the field of arts—and why do you feel this is important?

ALICK: We recognize that many of the technical tools we use were created in unethical ways with stolen content and stolen labor. We also know that these tools will be used by those with the most power to create more precariousness for laborers and to continue making labor onerous. We were already in the process of staying informed by following the work of Timnet Gebru and Emily Bender. We reflected on how AI has been used to facilitate surveillance—for example, price gouging people and targeting racialized populations—in our livestreams and articles.

As soon as the tech was publicly available, we started live-streaming our AI Experiments to test what the technology was capable of, good and bad. We quickly surfaced the reflexive White supremacy, ableism, and heterosexism often embedded in the ways the AI platforms rephrase or edit our ideas. We produced essays and notes from these AI Experiments.
 
Many of our artist collaborators have been very resistant to the ways individuals choose to operationalize AI to steal jobs. We designed the videogame The Road Trip to test the ability of the AI to generate code, images, and game dialog. We found that the machine by itself is not creative or aesthetically successful; it required specifying prompts and generating a massive amount [of code] to edit down from. The code was generated in minutes but took hours to fix. The game itself is a choose your own adventure that gives the feeling of an endless pointless road trip despite all the choices but then delivers you to a gallery full of actual visual artists and critiques of AI.

Despite the unethical practices used to build AI and problematic ways it is being operationalized we knew it wasn’t going anywhere. So, then we launched our Accessible Innovation program to explore the ways we could use artificial intelligence to generate essays from disabled content creators. It was done as livestreams and agency-filled collaborations and we discovered we could quickly generate essays that retained the style of the speaker and shared their ideas, but the process still required human intervention to guarantee positive results. We are prepping for another big collaboration empowering disabled artists to code their own AI.

NEA: What have been some reactions or memorable experiences that have occurred during one of these arts and technology-related activities?

ALICK: Our digital meetings allow us to connect across space and time in exciting and dynamic ways.  Two anecdotes come to mind. We hold a weekly meeting called “Open Development” where we share decolonized ideas for fundraising and promoting our practices. We use the space to share ideas, opportunities, and to co-work as we navigate digital application systems. This room is drop-in and often results in exciting new relationships. In one of our meetings, we had a disability and burlesque dance festival, an accessibility practice, a digital community group, and a disabled co-working space represented. Everyone was based in different states but, through the conversation, we learned that they had shared practices and needs. The burlesque group ended up hiring one of the other folks as a project manager and booking another group as performing artists. We not only shared resources and ideas that helped us fund our practices but also ended up growing our connections and ability to produce the work. The world is big, but our communities are tight, and digital technology gives us the ability to connect.

The second anecdote is from a few years ago when we were prepping to launch our WeChargeGenocide.TV platform. I noticed in my online research that Tongo Eisen had recently published a curriculum with the same title. He was a poet laureate, and we had a connection through my racial justice theater project, Every 28 Hours Plays. He committed to being in our livestream presentation to celebrate the website launch but was in a protest scheduled for the same time. We were able to integrate him performing from the march and it truly brought us together in racial justice from across the country. The ability to livestream from a phone has been a powerful piece of technology that amplifies our public performances for racial justice.

NEA: Can you share an example of a collaboration that brings together arts and technology across different sectors?

ALICK: Our Justice Producer Collaboration uses technology to bring folks across sectors together. We communicate between meetings on Discord, meet in a Zoom, and share resources with each other over a Padlet. These simple tools allow us to compare notes in our justice practices; get inspired by outcomes in heath, tech, political and education sectors; and connect it all with artistic practices.

We are always attempting to work with a big tent that dissolves the invisible barriers between justice practitioners that are created by fields. Our EarlyWords platform is a tool for doing morning pages, which is a great practice for artists, justice producers, and anyone looking to expand their creativity and grow their ability to think.

NEA: Do you have advice for small- or mid-sized arts organizations seeking to incorporate digital technology in their work, but have modest budgets or limited resources?

ALICK: Our practice has always been about reducing the barrier to entry and creating ramps to access technology. We have made our peer exchange programs like Producing in Pandemic, and Dis/Rep, available on video by demand. Our practice members teach different Rapid Response Tech Team Bootcamps on programs like Open Broadcast System or by designing videogames. Our Tech Co-op allows us to access the enterprise level software and stock image collections, and we share the costs. All the tools we design, such as Followers Forever, use a “pricing for justice” model that allows people to pay what they can.

 We don’t believe in a myth of perfection and know that the more we build the better we get at it. Not getting intimidated or frustrated by new platforms and different processes has been vital to growing our practice. We often have meeting and program structures that allow us to get inspired by others sharing their process. We also often co-work together and help each other through barriers.

My project WHY MASK is so simple and uses tools that are free and easy to use. It’s a Padlet that invites people to take a selfie and post some text. We make it accessible via a QR code on visual art and stickers. This project has nationwide participation and was just supported by the Portland Art Museum. Whatever ambitious idea you want to produce there is accessible technology to get you there.

Claudia Alick is a Black queer disabled performer, producer, writer, intersectional inclusion expert, digital artist, user experience director, and founder of Calling Up Justice. 

Jax Deluca oversees the NEA’s grant portfolio and resources focused on supporting the diverse ecology of film and media arts ecosystems across the nation.