“Let’s listen with our eyes and not just with our ears”
Christine Sun Kim is a Korean American artist based in Berlin. While I watched this short film, I remained fascinated. Christine’s way of owning sound to communicate/ create art was something I had never seen before. Christine experiences sound visually, and I as an audience am encouraged too. This made me reflect on my own privilege, the overdependence on using [only] my ears to respond to sounds – my view remaining narrow.
Christine’s art is multi-sensory – her work leads us to widen our perception of the many possibilities/ opportunities. She shares how watching other people’s reactions to sound made her aware of it.
Christine Sun Kim can be an example/ resource for students. With how Christine responds to sound as a visual image, learners can participate in a short writing exercise where they can engage/ collect sounds and interpret them (for e.g, what it means to them) – a basic exercise to move away from just listening with our ears. Christine in this video shares her frustration with closed captions – she talks about [e.g.] how background music is translated as just [music] or [violin playing] in the closed caption. This was something I had noticed when watching subtitled series in my own free time, but I had never considered the effects/restrictions of it. The video shows how describing the feelings/ moods of the sound, the descriptive closed caption enables and captures not only the sound but the emotions as well.
Throughout the film, the usage of subtitles was helpful in understanding Christine’s voice – this made me think about implementing simple accessibility in my future teaching, such as;
- leaving presentation on the board so learners can refer back to it
- subtitles, transcripts of audio and video formats provided
- alt text / image description
- giving out paper copies to follow along with the slide
- colour overlay sheet being provided to minimise discomfort when reading (Denton, T and Meindl, J, 2015).
Further reading/ resources:
The effect of coloured overlays on reading fluency individuals with dyslexia, Behaviour Analysis in Practice (pp, 191 – 198)
Artist Christine Sun Kim Rewrites Closed Captions | Pop- up Magazine