Rupturing cinema through disability-technology assemblages: Cinematic experiences of visually impaired and partially sighted students

This article is an attempt to examine the ways in which films, technology and disability intersect as an assemblage of bodies, thoughts, ideas, and co-constitute cinematic experiences. In particular, this study explores the experiences and encounters of the partially sighted and visually impaired students with films, digital technologies, and software. The engagements of visually impaired and partially sighted students reveal vicissitudes of assemblages that emerge as a subaltern coping mechanism. The disability-assemblage they form in this study during their interaction with films, technologies and bodies rupture the canons of spectatorship and open up new possibilities of cinema breaking down blindness and bodies. Through their affective engagements with technologies, cinema that encompasses all other allied technologies becomes a site of resistance and play in producing new images or the becoming-cinema. The findings of this study reveal that by forming disability-assemblage, participants produced slowness and stillness out of moving images, challenging the avowed temporal scales, and involved themselves in a play of activities working around interfaces, speakers, screens among others to emerge as becoming-spectators.