Kim expresses attitudes to her disability as a negation, or ‘choking’ of her voice- because she couldn’t experience sound in an unmediated form, she had to allow others to define it for her.
Her work reinterprets sound in a way she can experience it. By moving it into a physical form- having it animate ribbons and strands of thread or rotate plastic propellors, she is ‘reclaiming’ the sense and removing the necessity of a mediator.
This made me reflect on the importance of teaching in a multiplicity of formats.
Currently, due to time and resource limitations, I have primarily understood this as the need to provide audio recordings for briefs, images, video for online learning.
However, the film has made me question whether producing learning materials can be more creative, i.e using physical objects as the basis for a lesson and how this could open up possibilities for different kinds of learning.
One response to “On Christine Sum Kim (https://vimeo.com/31083172)”
Christine’s experience of sound as not belonging to her has really stayed with me. I agree that the media we use must be more expansive and flexible and that it’s not just about audio transcriptions and closed captions but about our teaching methods and objects. But these can also be exclusionary. I teach a unit that dedicates significant time to sound design. Although none of my students has disclosed a hearing disability, that doesn’t mean I can ignore the (in)accessibility of sound. Inspired by Christine, I could redesign the unit to consider alternative creative expressions of sound – that audio shouldn’t be mandated as one of the outputs of the unit.