limp.freq

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Despite work by the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative and others, many environments still assume an imagined, idealized body that recalls Le Corbusier’s discredited Modulor Man and, despite renewed interest in Brutalist architecture, its underlying assumptions remain under-scrutinized. Accessibility, if addressed at all, is often condensed into a single wheelchair ramp or similar tokenism. Mobility, however, is a continuum, and those who fall between normative design categories are often excluded. For example, my own experiences are significantly shaped by lower-limb difference (far more than by my one-handedness), largely because its cascading effects on posture, balance, movement, and navigation are rarely considered in spatial design.

The frictions encountered reveal how environments unavoidably encode assumptions about which bodies are normalized. limp.freq (Figs. 1--3) asks what might change if these frictions are made visible and accumulated. To do this, it employs a series of interactive, browser-based simulations and related images that record and contrast the movements of a diverse population of self-navigating bots. Informed by the artist’s own leg length discrepancy, the green bots move more slowly, effortfully, and awkwardly than the standardized, efficient orange bots. However, their collective trails not only disclose an experiential and epistemic richness but also quietly speculate an alternative history of AI grounded in imperfection.