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Many of my particular corners of the internet depict the future as a far-off space where humans, disconnected from our current realities, are defined by our interactions with a variety of technologies. In these distant worlds, people flit through angular architecture in semi-digital bodies that seem to feel neither pain nor desire. I often wonder if they sense the reality of their bodies at all. I wonder how we will get from here to there.

Because my daily life is intensely focused on my body, I tend to see the body as an interpretive anchor. My body teaches me that the future is not a distant and unfamiliar environment; rather, it will emerge from the ways we pay attention to our present. We will transition from now to then by attending to our bodies and delving into the questions our bodies ask of us.

Because I am a dancer and choreographer who uses a wheelchair and crutches–and sometimes both together–some of my work begins with the creative transformation of these mobility technologies. I am a disabled artist, and my chair and crutches are beautifully designed, well-crafted pieces of metal alloy and carbon fiber. Once I begin to use them, they are no longer tools or devices; they become bodies, as full and expressive as the flesh I was born with.

That is a tricky distinction.

In a former life, I was a medievalist who spent a lot of time thinking about connections between the etymology of a word and the ways we use it now. I name my chair as a technology not because it is a designed, engineered device, nor because it is digital or a cyborg in the casual ways that we often think of “tech,” but because it is a techne, a way of knowing and living in the world. On the one hand, I often find myself caught up in desiring the most up-to-date wheelchairs because “technology” enables better design, materials, and ways of manufacturing; on the other hand, I still maintain that my wheelchair is a metallic body, as natural to me as my flesh body. My insistence on living and working from these places can lead to some interesting conversations.