Sara Hendren

My work often engages cultural ideas about disability, but those interests are the particulars in a larger set of concerns that are grabbing my attention. At the heart of these interests is dynamic interdependence: this thing that leans upon that, contingency, reciprocity, mutuality.

I’m interested in questions of interdependence as a subject—especially where critical art and design projects can interrupt cultural assumptions about autonomy or dependence, abled or disabledness. Here on Abler you’ll see my own work and that of others where these questions are at hand.

But I’m also interested in interdependence as a means for work—collaborations with others outside my field. I’m especially engaged by areas of research that are typically relegated to scientific disciplines, and I’m trying to name the shared concerns, as well as the distinctions, among artists and scientists in confronting complex questions. With this site, I’m collecting examples of work where there’s a genuinely blurred boundary between the practice of science and the practice of art.

While there’s certainly much trendy talk now about interdisciplinarity, too much of the work that purports to be “art-about-science” is just aestheticizing ideas. What I’m concerned with is research work where the first principles and guiding questions are important enough to invite both quantifiable data and humanistic concerns.  I explore this interest in detail, with examples, in a three-part essay that you can read starting here. I’m on Twitter: @ablerism; link also on the home page.

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After studying studio-based visual arts as an undergraduate, I started teaching, worked in education research at Harvard Project Zero, and then got an M.A. in European history at UCLA, specializing in the history of science, the invention of democracy, and intellectual/cultural history in the modern period.

I continued work in social science research, and, ten years after I left it behind, started making art again. Everything came together as I got interested in public, collaborative, and research/process-based work.

My short film, Tools for Historical Imagination: Jury Duty was recently shown at the CUNY Graduate Center Gallery, as part of Linda Pollack’s Habeas Lounge, and, prior to that, at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica as part of the exhibition Patriot Acts. I’m developing other “tools” like this: works that examine socio-political institutions and practices.

Most recently, I’ve been collaborating with the Philosophical Psychology Lab at Gordon College, working with philosopher Brian Glenney and students from computer science, cognitive psychology, and other fields on experiments with sensory substitution—specifically, on a device that translates a camera’s visual intake into “readable” sound waves in headphones. (That’s me, in the upper left corner of the masthead, wearing the device for one of the lab’s search tasks.) We’re asking all kinds of questions about the attempt to merge or blur these discrete senses—experiential, philosophical, neurological, and aesthetic. And we’re seeing how far we can push the poetics of the device as adaptive technology. We recently exhibited drawings, video, and other documentation of the work so far in a group show at Gordon College, “Drawing As Encounter.”

CURRICULUM VITAE

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