Staring Back: Hacking Intersectional Oppression through Eco-Crip: Cybotanical Futures

Abstract

The author discusses their transmedia art installation, Eco-Crip: Cybotanical Futures (2021), as a site that critically explores and re-worlds the intersectional oppressions faced by disabled BIPOC individuals—centering on their own identity and complex lived experiences. Through a re-worlding lens, the artwork harnesses autoethnography, disability justice, and critical theory to confront and reclaim lifelong systemic oppression and medical surveillance, integrating computational art and digital painting to reconstruct medically quantified bioimaging and South Asian botanical archives into alternative “Cybotanical” futures. The author traces this work back to their earlier piece, ‘Keep This Leaflet. You May Need to Read It Again’ (2014), a seminal creation in their criptech journey. Eco-Crip: Cybotanical Futures embraces a DIY ethos to hack and decolonize archives and technologies, navigating multifaceted meaning-making where beauty and pain converge—mapping new frontiers of crip technoscience art that challenges various systems of power and their associated gazes.