This article illustrates a collaboration-in-formation between a performing artist and a neuroscientist. The authors focus on the early clarification of cross-disciplinary language and their recognition of the frameworks, overlaps, and divergences between how puppetry animation and neuroscience approach body, breath, imagination, disability, embodiment, consciousness, and research itself. The authors briefly discuss the creative process in puppetry performance and ask questions about what normative assumptions exist in neuroscience and how they interface with the authors’ perspectives as researcher-practitioners.

A disabled poet with Rett syndrome and a disabled performing artist with type 1 diabetes document their 12-month artistic collaboration to illuminate ground-time : the nonverbal, expressive dynamics of embodied communication. Five “communication moments” between the artists (documented in writing, video, and photo) are described. Potentials and limitations of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technologies, specifically Tobii Dynavox eye-tracking technology and Communicator 5, are discussed. Additionally, the authors question the clinical diagnostic category of “intellectual disability” on the grounds of disability justice, decolonial science, and philosophy. Communication-assistive technology platform developers are challenged to consider relational embodiment as the foundation of communication in design decisions regarding platform function. Technologies should facilitate improvisation and nonlinear expression—verbal and nonverbal— while maintaining freedom of nondisclosure. The right to opacity in communication is also discussed.