INVISIBLE MACHINES

Invisible Machines is an experimental ethnographic film that explores the history and contemporary everyday of “real time captioners” who use stenotype machines to instantaneously transcribe classroom speech to readable text for d/Deaf students. Working against common misconceptions that human captioners and stenotype machines are obsolete relics, my film is part of a larger project that understands stenographic labour not as mired in the past, but as a complex, idiosyncratic and important case. By interrupting the normative coherence of sound and image, the film reflexively undermines the fluency of its own audio track, recreating the gaps in the work of interpretation and translation, making these palpable to the viewers. The real-time experience of stenographic labor has much to say to our current concerns about automation, the future of work, and evolving notions of information and access.