I started off looking at Christine Sun Kim’s film on her performance practice. I love her work – it really makes me think about sound in a different way and to consider the experience of the d/Deaf or hard of hearing. While I hadn’t seen this video before, she has one called Closed Captions, which I usually show to my Writing as Performance students. Like me, most of the students in my classes are hearing, so I use this video to challenge them to think of captions as an integral part of any performance work, which can expand and change the meaning and reach of a work. As Kim highlights in Closed Captions: to craft a good caption or audio description takes skill, creativity, poetry and humour. Appling this to my own work, practically, I realised I needed to be careful not to describe sound with another sound e.g. simply putting the title of the song playing, as this might be equally inaccessible to someone Deaf. Instead, Kim’s work challenged me to find ways of describing sound through visuals, textures and emotions. Not only does this make my own work more accessible, but expands the way I think of sound in my work. I’ve become more aware of what the function of sound is in my work.
Watching this video on Kim’s practice set for us in class consolidates my learning around this – she talks about hearing with your eyes not just your ears. Right at the beginning she talks about how she wants to take back possession of sound! I find this really inspiring, and I think she’s successful. Having previously been familiar with Kim’s work, I find it’s interesting that she/Selby made the decision not to audio describe the ambient sounds she uses. At first I think about how perhaps, ironically, this film is not fully accessible to a d/Deaf or hard of hearing audience. However, on reflection I think that perhaps my understanding of the parameters of what an audio description can be, is still too closed. I still think of them as words that appear on the bottom of the screen, alongside subtitles. Perhaps this film, by representing each sound in such a visually poetic and visceral way is actually bringing audio description centre screen – the visuals are doing the work of describing the sound already. I still have a lot of learning to do around this, and this reminds me not to centre my own idea of what access looks like.
I’ve also looked at the UAL’s disability web page on the social model of disability. They talk about how as an art school, we should apply our creativity to making art that is accessible for all. The Terms of Reference Journal on Disability, particularly the article ‘Disabled People: The Voice of Many’, contextualises the university’s subscription to this model in a wider discussion around different terminologies used by disabled activists and theorists.
Following the engagement with these resources, I’m thinking I would like to initiate an open discussion around access to the classroom, perhaps through set tasks for the students to creatively caption their own work, following watching both these videos by Kim, and perhaps others. Captions are still rare in live performance, which is the field I teach and work in. This means that performance regularly excludes deaf people, which is really a kind of segregation. I would like us as a department to learn not to replicate this violence.
There are complexities around this idea – with a lack of d/Deaf or hard of hearing students and teachers – how would we asses the effectiveness of what the students made? How would we ensure that the students didn’t fetishise or patronise deafness? There was a discussion in one PGCert seminar about a tendency for designers to over-design for disabled people – to create ‘solutions’ for problems that don’t exist, while simultaneously ignoring the real needs of the disabled. I could bring all these ethical issues to the students to discuss and think about when making.
I don’t have all the answers. The reality of working as an artist, as I’ve found it, means that often if you don’t caption your own performance or film work, it won’t get done. This means that hearing artists often end up doing captioning, without having experience of what it’s like to rely on captions. In the past I’ve been lucky enough to be able to demand budget to pay a person who is deaf to consult & review my captions. In practice we work through these issues and it would be good to open a forum with the students on different ways to navigate this.