Why you should trust Dr. Fifi

Dearest, most trusted subscribers,

I’m super excited to share that Feeling is Believing, the project I’ve been working on for the CripTech AI lab is finally live on the virtual exhibition website, “Slow AI.” I love the one-liner that M Eilo, lead artist for the incubator, came up with for my piece: “An ad for a speculative imaging machine that can see any ailment.” 👀 You can visit the exhibition here, navigate to my page directly here, or watch the video by clicking the ad unlisted YouTube link below.

Project description from the exhibition:

Feeling is Believing is a crip critique of the medical-industrial complex and its reliance on visual evidence for diagnosis. Drawing from the artist’s experience spending years chasing after diagnoses for their chronic pain and illness, the project takes the form of a TV infomercial and a radio ad for a fantasy medical imaging device called the Intuitive Imaging Instrument that combines xerography, aura photography, and AI-powered diagnostic models to provide patients with tangible evidence of the pain that goes undetected by the tools of traditional Western medicine. The artist plays a California provider with unclear credentials, a big-haired entrepreneur from a time warp where toll-free numbers, agentic AI, and TikTok doctors coexist.

There’s a video version (the TV ad) and an audio-only version (the radio ad) and the exhibition site is fully accessible. Both were soundtracked in collaboration with the one and only Clara Venice, who is, unsurprisingly, also a sound effects wizard. Eventually I’d like to release an extended version of the infomercial that features Clara playing the theremin to power the Intuitive Imaging Instrument, so stay tuned (no pun intended).

Now that fall semester classes are over, I plan to release more comics and post a bit more regularly. Thank you for your patience as High Functioning unfolds in different forms and on crip time. Next semester, I’m teaching a class at Scripps College called “Crip Aesthetics,” so I’m excited to share little tidbits of that here, too.

Happy December! We are almost through this dumpster fire of a year. I hope that everyone manages to find some pockets of joy, whether that means getting extra sleep or finding a weird little tchotchke to gift to yourself.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Fifi