TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Disability often elicits visceral emotions—disgust, fear, irritation—reactions that many able-bodied individuals experience when encountering a disabled body. Does this render disability a near-taboo identity? These tensions were confronted in Crip Sensorama, an XR artwork exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. This immersive experience invited visitors to navigate the everyday life of disabled artist Christian Bayerlein, who lives with spinal muscular atrophy, through playful and unconventional gestures. Audiences opened their mouths wide, puffed their cheeks, and extended their tongues to move and interact within the virtual environment—transgressing what disability scholar Alison Kafer terms “compulsory able-bodiedness.”

Current XR technologies predominantly rely on hand and head movements to explore virtual worlds, reinforcing an able-bodied design paradigm that HCI researchers Gerling and Spiel describe as a "corporeal standard". This ableist framework excludes individuals with limited sensorimotor abilities from full access to these devices. Addressing this exclusion, Crip Sensorama hacked camera-based technology, enabling Christian to interact in XR using chin, jaw, and tongue movements—redefining the interface to center the mouth as an accessible and inclusive modality.

This presentation will delve into the artistic and technical processes behind Crip Sensorama, demonstrating how the mouth—a visceral organ often tied to intimacy and taboo—was transformed into both a practical interface and an artistic provocation. By reimagining the bucca (mouth) as a tool for interaction, the work not only subverted technological ableism in XR but also brought audiences into intimate proximity with disability culture.

Ultimately, this talk will argue for the mouth as a “trouble-maker” in XR art, capable of unsettling entrenched misconceptions about disability, revealing the biases embedded in technology, and fostering a deeper understanding of disability as a site of creativity, desire, and embodied agency.