American techno-artist Mark Pauline (Survival Research Labs) with one of his robot hands

Arts and disability interfaces
new technology, disabled artists and audiences

This report (in 4 parts) was undertaken as a New Audiences scoping study for Arts Council England to recommend a suggested programme of further activities and research, designed to enable disabled artists to choose, utilise and adopt new technologies. It includes:

• a comprehensive survey of existing and new technologies, both assistive and of general use, with examples of current use;
• the relevance of specific developments in new technologies for disabled artists, arts practitioners and audiences;
• specific recommendations for further activity and research.

The study aims to describe key relevant technologies in clear language. The focus is on new or emerging technology and the methods being developed to interact with it, rather than on standard technology that has replaced older methods (as in animation and film, for instance). Issues of aesthetics, access, disability and other social or cultural factors are introduced only where they are pertinent to the aims of the study.

Warning: links to online sources were live only when checked from August to October 2002.

All 4 documents are available in either Microsoft Word or PDF format (Some Word documents are larger file sizes but text-readable, PDFs are smaller and don't require Word, but are not always compatible with text-reading software).