Disabled Joy in Motion - 2024

Materials: Phones, Augmented Reality, Unity, Projection

Part of the Traces Exhibition at the Attenborough Arts Center - Leicester, UK.


“Wheeltrails” is a performance of disabled joy in motion. This motion is both a community movement as trail making workshops bringing wheelchair users together and the physical movement of their wheelchairs. Taking place in the Attenborough Arts Centre's gallery and using digital sensors and augmented reality, participants explored their chairs movement as a creative body and its interaction with the space, discovering their own sense of joy through digital drawing with their wheels. Creating digital, floor based, animated, wheel trails flowing throughout the gallery. The Augmented Reality experience was a transitory one that was only for the performer. What is left behind and shared with you here is their realtime, wheelchair motion, moving through the gallery.

The wheelchair artists put words to their experience:

“Curious, fun, collaborative, free, expressive, creative, wiggle, spiral”.

Disabled joy is a form of resistance. A wheelchair is often seen through a medical lens. To suggest that it’s a joyful, creative body counters simple narratives of disabled identity being defined by an absence. That the barriers and limits to joy might be more to do with the choice of society than the individuals experience.

A large group of people are surrounding a ceiling directed projection onto the concrete floor. The projection is two different wheelchair trails moving and dancing with each other. One trail is bright pink and the other is blue.
Floor projected wheelchair trail duet
A projection of a white wheelchair trail on a yellow, concrete floor. There is a bench near by for sitting and watching the trails.
Floor projected wheelchair trail
A projection of a white wheelchair trail on a yellow, concrete floor.
Floor projected wheelchair trail
A projection of a white wheelchair trail on a yellow, concrete floor.
Floor projected wheelchair trail

Creating a trail

An augmented reality view of a gallery space. There is a digital trail with the words 'disabled joy in motion' flowing along the trail. The trail moves around the floor of the gallery, full of spirals and slowly curving lines.
Augmented Reality view of a single wheelchair trail

Support

Commissioned and supported by Attenborough Arts Centre, Unlimited, celebrating the work of disabled artists, The SouthBank Centre and Arts Council England.