Human difference as creativity: from witch hunts to disability art

This article introduces disability art, a form of art gaining social visibility and attracting academic attention worldwide. It aims to demonstrate how disability art can broaden our understanding of reality, including the phenomenon of humanness. By revealing the creative dimension of disability, which we consider a form of human difference, this article draws parallels between the negative social treatment of disability and witch hunts, arguing that such treatment is a prejudiced exclusionary social practice directed against human difference. It has become especially prominent in the context of scientific and technological expansion, which shapes the cultural conditions of the contemporary world. The analysis integrates the disability rights discourse, the concept of artistic research, and one author’s technologically mediated experience of disability, further exploring the relationship between disability and the revelation of human creative potential (Markuckas, 2026).