(Look, I’ve really tried my best to avoid the pretentious vocabulary so far but something about chronic illness and time travel just brings it out in me.)

When we think about accessibility, we tend to think about space (physical or digital). We don’t often think about accessing time.

A couple years ago, I was invited to a physically remote, but temporally synchronous opening for a disability arts exhibition I was part of. During the pandemic years, I watched as videoconferencing platforms opened up possibilities for, and acceptance of physically distributed co-presence—that is, ways of being together with each other, without being physically in the same space. Disabled folks who had struggled to attend art and social events were suddenly able to. But when I got those invites, I found myself still invariably checking off ‘maybe,’ knowing that ‘maybe’ really meant ‘probably not.’

This time, I sent the event organizers something more honest:

Hi —
Apologies for not replying to this sooner! To be honest, RSVPs are fraught for me, which made me uncertain about how best to reply, which in turn is a great way of causing my executive dysfunction to take over and make me unable to answer at all.

The response I had initially planned to attend was going to be Yes, with the caveat that I may not be able to depending how I feel that day.

But that is just really just reframing temporal inaccessibility as embodied dysfunction, and moreover, has long functioned as a way that I am Othered even within disabled community. So I am wondering if you all would be open to trying something.

I'm wondering if you'd be willing to work with me to create a way for artists and guests to attend this event asynchronously. I am thinking of something conceptually along the lines of The Cyborg Jillian Weise's A Kim Deal Party.

I am asking myself how might one go about creating temporally distributed co-presence at an art exhibit opening? (It's hard for me to even know what experience we'd be trying to replicate since the last gallery opening I was able to attend was my own thesis exhibition a decade ago.

But I am envisioning perhaps a Google Form where attendees who plan to attend asynchronously can share a photo of themselves if they like, maybe even dressed up like they wish they got to do more often. It will have questions they can answer, inspired by the kinds of conversations that might place at such a gallery opening, and questions that situate their presence within their current spatial and temporal context (the weather's always an easy one to start with!) They could answer as many or as few of these as they like.

Their responses will be shared on the — website in time for the synchronous event, during which synchronous attendees would be offered the option to fill out the same Google Form in real-time, and have their own responses added to the website after the fact.

Let me know your thoughts - I think there is an opportunity here to do something quite experimental and interesting, and perhaps setting a new standard of what temporal access can look like, and I'm hoping we can figure out a way to make it happen!

Cheers,

Alex

The temporally distributed art opening didn’t happen in the end. But the exchange got me thinking about what a temporally distributed event might look like, and later that year I decided that for once, I wanted to hold a birthday party.