Cybercrip Art
Disability, Digital Practice, and Embodied Resistance
- 2026
- Book
- Author
- Anna Hughes
- Publisher
- Springer Nature Switzerland
About this book
This book offers a crip perspective on the interplay between digital media and embodied experience. It champions the insights of disabled people, arguing for a cyberspace that is inclusive, sensual, and creatively rich. This book intertwines personal narrative with contemporary art, crip theory, cyberfeminism, and philosophy, presenting a nuanced understanding of how alternative embodiments thrive in digital spaces. This book is not only a personal narrative but also a critical, theoretical exploration that invites readers to rethink the boundaries of digital and physical embodiment.
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Table of Contents
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Frontmatter
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1. Digital Digits
Anna HughesIn this chapter, the author shares their journey of creating a digital hand using the open-source programme Blender, exploring the complexities of representation and the potential of digital practices in redefining bodily experiences. The author delves into the theoretical frameworks of representation, meaning-making, and crip theory, drawing on the works of Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Karen Barad. The chapter also discusses the role of affect and the potential of digital bodies to evoke meaningful responses. The author's personal narrative of living with chronic illness and the impact it has on their artistic practice is interwoven throughout the text, providing a unique and insightful perspective on the intersection of digital art, embodiment, and disability. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the potential of digital practices to challenge dominant systems of meaning-making and to create new possibilities for embodied experiences.AI Generated
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AbstractThis chapter introduces the “digital hand” as I learn to work with the 3D software Blender in response to my developing illness. This shift to a more accessible art-making method prompts me to question how the digital hand can exceed mere representation. Drawing on a “sick” reading of Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, I challenge assumptions that figurative imagery is inherently hollow. Lyotard critiques semiotic readings that reduce signs to empty signifiers and instead calls for a sensual, affective understanding of the sign and its capacity to do more than represent.My digital hand performs differently from its “original”: my fleshy hands have lost function but could never traverse cyberspace as this mesh-based hand does. Unlike a photograph, this hand can interact within a three-dimensional, world-building space and carries the trace of the time I have spent making it. It circulates easily yet retains a specific relationality with my body, operating simultaneously as signification and affect.Building on artists such as Kate Cooper and Ed Atkins, and theorists including Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, the chapter frames digital embodiment through new materialist thought. This approach undoes Cartesian dualisms, reimagining digital media as co-constitutive with living bodies rather than as disembodied imitation. -
2. Fleshing Out a Disembodied Hand: Digital Emancipation and Embodiment
Anna HughesThis chapter explores the concept of digital emancipation and its relationship with embodiment, particularly in the context of chronic illness. The author delves into the idea of disembodiment, discussing how technology can offer a sense of freedom from the constraints of a sick body. The narrative is deeply personal, drawing from the author's own experiences with Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS). The chapter also examines the role of digital tools like Blender in creating art and expressing creativity despite physical limitations. It critiques neoliberal models of disability and their impact on individuals, highlighting the pressures to overcome physical limitations and the societal expectations placed on disabled people. The author discusses the potential of cyberfeminism and the grotesque body as frameworks for understanding and embracing the complexities of chronic illness. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the author's journey and the ongoing struggle for meaningful inclusion and support for disabled individuals.AI Generated
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AbstractSevered Hands explores the interrelations of illness, technology, and embodiment. As a body in chronic pain, I confront both the desire to escape and the impossibility of full disembodiment. My practice becomes a hybrid one, informed by cyberfeminist thought and especially the Xenofeminist Manifesto, which critiques biological essentialism and proposes technological systems that resist capitalist and patriarchal dominance. Being sick affirms the mutability of biology, exposing how essentialism sustains oppression. Alternatives such as FOSS and crowdsourced healthcare reveal possibilities but also risks of neoliberal or libertarian logics centred on individual freedoms rather than equitable access.Reclaiming hybridity, I turn to Donna Haraway’s cyborg, while also addressing critiques by theorists such as Sara Cohen Shabot, who warns against its reduction to a perfected posthuman figure. Instead, I argue for a cyborg that embraces the “messy meat” of bodies, resonating with Shabot’s notion of the grotesque body and its porous, fluid boundaries.The chapter also examines the severed hand as an artistic and cultural motif, from The Addams Family to Tai Shani. The severed hand unsettles ideas of autonomy, labour, and mind–body dualisms, while its uncanny resonance foregrounds how biopolitics and neoliberalism devalue disabled and sick bodies through logics of mind over matter. -
3. Abject Horror: Experiments in Gory Textures
Anna HughesThis chapter explores the creation of lifelike digital textures using Blender, focusing on the author's personal journey of exploring their own body through digital art. The author delves into the technical aspects of creating textures, including the use of subsurface scattering and particle formations, and discusses the emotional resonance of abject horror in virtual spaces. The chapter also touches on the author's experience with a chronic illness and how it has influenced their approach to digital art. The author's exploration of digital textures and abject horror culminates in a powerful discussion of the emotional resonance of virtual spaces and the potential for digital art to evoke deep emotional responses. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the author's personal journey and the transformative power of digital art.AI Generated
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AbstractThis chapter investigates how touch can be reimagined through digital media. Moving beyond a narrow definition of touch as flesh-to-flesh contact, I argue for an expanded understanding in which texture can be perceived visually or aurally, eliciting embodied responses. In this sense, digital media can evoke tactile experiences without negating the presence of the body. Through modelling bodily materials in Blender, I explore viscosity, opacity, undulation, and roughness, reclaiming a body often medicalised as “deviant.” This process is cathartic, reframing my body as biological matter continuous with its digital rendering and merging physical and virtual presence through textural exploration.Drawing on Karen Barad’s theories of virtuality and matter, I develop a framework for understanding virtual touch as a mode of closeness. This reconceptualization highlights the affective possibilities of digital media beyond representation. To further contextualise these dynamics, I turn to cultural practices such as ASMR and the online slime trend, both of which cultivate affective textures that move beyond simple imitation. These practices suggest how digital media can generate new modes of intimacy and sensory engagement, opening possibilities for experiences of touch that resist reductive capitalist frameworks and expand the scope of embodied interaction in virtual environments. -
4. Excessive Movement
Anna HughesThis chapter explores the creation of a digital hand as a means of expression and connection for someone living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). The author discusses the challenges of joint hypermobility and the pain it causes, contrasting it with the freedom of movement in a digital space. The digital hand serves as a prosthetic extension, allowing the author to reach out and connect with others in new ways. The text delves into the politics of disability, challenging the notion of a 'complete' body and emphasizing the importance of bodily agency. It also examines the role of technology in disability activism, highlighting how digital tools can be used to create and adapt to one's needs. The chapter concludes by advocating for a more inclusive and flexible understanding of disability, one that embraces the complexities and variations of embodied experiences.AI Generated
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AbstractThis chapter explores mobility as both physical movement and social positioning, drawing on my lived experience of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. While my condition presents as flexibility, it simultaneously restricts mobility, heightening my awareness of bodily agency, proximity, and movement. In Blender, I rig a digital hand to experiment with exaggerated motion, producing imagery that resonates without reproducing the pain of moving my fleshy hands. Digital practice thus becomes a space of expanded mobility, not simply imitating physical gesture but extending it.I situate this exploration alongside artists such as Abi Palmer, Steven Dwoskin, and Rebecca Horn, who engage mobility and bodily extension in inventive ways. Horn’s Finger Gloves, for example, reconfigure closeness and agency through bodily prosthesis. These works highlight how disability prompts rethinking movement as subject rather than deficit.The chapter also critiques models of disability. While the Social Model remains essential in articulating equitable provisions such as PIP, its emphasis on societal barriers risks overlooking bodies disabled by their own material conditions. I argue instead for a crip theoretical approach that affirms mutability, self-inclusion, and creative flourishing. Embracing bodily difference as integral to coalition-building, crip theory opens possibilities for imagining mobility as fluid, relational, and generative. -
5. Predicting the Future
Anna HughesThis chapter explores the creation of a digital hand as a tool for navigating and expressing the complexities of chronic illness. The author delves into the use of 3D modeling software to create a digital hand, examining how this process allows for a more expansive understanding of the body and its place in dimensional space. The chapter also discusses the concept of 'fictioning' as a method for exploring potential realities and challenging conventional perceptions of time and embodiment. Additionally, the author reflects on the role of technology in enabling and augmenting creative practices, particularly for those with chronic illnesses. The chapter concludes with a vision for a future where digital technology and embodiment intersect to create new possibilities for expression and understanding.AI Generated
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AbstractThis chapter examines futurity through the lens of disability and illness, drawing on my digital hand as both metaphor and method. The lines on the hand’s palm evoke traditions of fortune-telling while underscoring the unpredictability of living with illness and neurodivergence. Alison Kafer’s concept of “crip time” becomes central here, disrupting linear models of time and revealing how disabled lives require flexibility, reorientation, and openness to uncertainty. Illness not only unsettles the future but reshapes the past, leaving me grounded in the present. Working with 3D software, I find that its translation of spatial movements into linear timelines fosters a reciprocal relationship between body and technology, a feedback loop of input, learning, and output.This process resonates with Simon O’Sullivan and David Burrow’s idea of “fictioning,” where digital tools enable the imagining of worlds beyond the immediately visible. While technology often promises accessibility or cure, Kafer warns that such assumptions risk erasing disabled futures. Contemporary developments in AI intensify this tension, holding potential for access but also perpetuating capitalist logics of exclusion. My own digital practice resists utopian speculation, instead presenting sensuous, embodied virtual worlds that emphasise affective presence. These sick worlds assert disabled futurity as already here, textured and tangible. -
Backmatter
- Electronic ISBN
- 978-3-032-15942-7
- Print ISBN
- 978-3-032-15944-1
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-15942-7
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