Unbuilt Environments

Video Loop

Utopian and dystopian environments for disabled people, built in Unreal Engine and based on collaboration with disabled-led groups and disabled people in East London.

Unbuilt Environments was commissioned by UCL’s (University College London) Trellis scheme for collaboration between artists and researchers. Working alongside computer science researcher and disability activist Anna Landre, and based at the Global Disability Innovation Hub at UCL, Anna and artist Alistair Gentry worked with disabled people near to UCL’s new campus in East London to discuss and manifest their experiences of the built environment. This included groups and individuals with a wide range of disabilities, from mobility to visual impairment or blindness. Particular attention was paid to the social model of disability, in which it is not disabled people who are deficient or at fault but instead society that disables us – through our employers, through the state, via our communities, via culture as a whole – because of wider society’s inability (or unwillingness) to understand and adapt to the differing needs of D/deaf, disabled, chronically ill, mentally il, or neurodivergent people. The installation shows a series of scenes inspired by these conversations; some are specific to the culture(s) of East London – Cockney rhyming slang, for example, in which raspberry ripple (a type of ice cream) is a euphemism for the outdated term “cripple”– and some relate to experiences common to many disabled people of being stranded, abandoned, humiliated, pitied, or constantly reminded of their difference, or to their reclamation of terms such as “crip” or “mad.” The choice of using Unreal Engine, often used for building video games or architectural visualisations, also references the need for escape and respite through gaming, science fiction, and other media that disabled people often spoke of to us, and that we recognised in ourselves… but even these spaces can be problematic for a disabled person as they too often reify the idea of a “normal” body and its opposites, or thoughtlessly reproduce tropes related to injury, illness and disability as sites of horror or sources of corruption and evil.