Andy Slater is a Chicago-based media artist, sound designer, writer, performer, access creator, and 37th level blind person. Central to his practice is access authorship—making art where access features are not add-ons, but core creative elements. His projects are marked by humor, understanding that he is misunderstood, and a refusal to surrender the narrative. His painting series Invisible Ink exists only as richly composed image descriptions, challenging ocular supremacy. Unseen Sound is an XR experience that uses spatial audio, poetic captioning, and accessible gameplay, intentionally allowing conflict between all accommodations. Slater’s performances center the blind body in space and the phonology of the white cane. These movement-based pieces are both performance and composition, focusing on the sonic and tactile experience of navigation and environmental activation. He uses emerging and archaic access technology—into these works, layering his physical presence with sounds of “blind people stuff.” He has exhibited at the Tribeca Festival, Transmediale, Links Hall, and Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional, and has presented at the XR Access Symposium, MIT Spatial Sound Lab, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has been published in ” stuff like Leonardo Journal” and McSweeney’s Quarterly, showing that academia and satire can easily co-exist.  Whether cluttering galleries, thwacking his cane on city streets, or trapped in VR, Slater approaches access as both craft and philosophy—building works that invite audiences to experience art as something to be moved through, listened to, felt in full, and to be taken very, very seriously.

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