I read a news story that quoted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia speaking about an opinion he had written on disability as saying “twelve miles is twelve miles for everyone,” and thought, that is not true. Of course, it is true in the sense that a mile is a standard of measure. But it is not true experientially. The traversing of distance is always configured by matters of physical, political, economic and social capacities. When I went to make the piece, I looked for the article that prompted it. I couldn’t find it. Now I wonder if he ever said this sentence. I imagine him as someone who would have. This modest manifesto made out of masking tape patterned to look like measuring tape asks us to value experiential knowledge, to hold open its contradictions with standard measures, and to build our worlds in different ways than those championed by Antonin Scalia.
