Note: This project was designed for the printed journal, our website is limited in presentation. Four pairs of vellum inserts with handwritten captions and subtitles were placed in four places in the issue, overlaying other contributor’s texts. For the best experience of the project, order a copy here.
X—
Visual Intonations
In CAPS SUBS, Christine Sun Kim creates handwritten captions and subtitles that are printed on vellum and inserted in pairs throughout the issue. The superimposed texts act as a closed caption or subtitle for the images and texts that surface through the translucent sheets. In TV, video, and films, captions are intended for a Deaf and hard-of-hearing audience. They are intended to be inclusive, expository, and conceptual: good captions can describe visual or non-visual sounds and who or what is the source of the sound; their placement on the screen can give information about where the sound originates from. In contrast, subtitles are direct translations of language, usually written notations of spoken dialogue, and are what most people encounter when watching films in another language. Kim’s captions, at the top of the page, take the form of intensifiers, and the subtitles, at the bottom, act as downtoners. Amplifiers and downtoners—such as heavy, slight, almost—are commonly used adverbs that emphasize or downplay the intention of a statement.
Those of us who fall on the Deaf and hard-of-hearing spectrum are intimately familiar with insufficient, weak, or untrustworthy captioning. I crave more helpful and interesting descriptions of sound in lieu of minimal and unhelpful subtitles (in Christine’s words: “monotonous half-assery”). At its worst, closed captioning can be opaque, unhelpful, and uncreative: “[Music].” Sometimes captions are misused and censor profanity; other times they contain weird and mesmerizing language abstractions, such as the extremely flawed computerized text-to-speech captions generated on YouTube (my personal favorite). At its best, captioning can be descriptive and pique the imagination. Relying on captions requires trust, because captioners—like ASL interpreters—decide how best to describe what they are hearing and thus mediate our reading of a work. I am in a long process of learning American Sign Language (ASL), and I am inspired by the incredible amount of communicative nuance. Entire concepts exist spatially and visually that can’t be translated into English words. Eyebrows and shoulders, for example, can add layers of wild intonation and subtle emotion to make a sentence more complex. Conversely, the Deaf community utilizes “loanwords” from English in texts, emails, and social media, blending English and ASL to communicate certain concepts. For example, the sign in ASL for finish is used to convey that something has ended. In these pages, Kim places the adverb hard before finish, which amplifies the intensity, abruptness, or strong conviction in bringing the idea or sentence to a close. But hard finish doesn’t translate in the same way in English. It’s a verbal description of a visual intonation.
In Kim’s project for X-TRA, she develops a particular cadence that utilizes her own handwriting in lieu of voice and proposes trading linguistic knowledge for possibility. The first page of each pair has a bold caption/ intensifier at the top and a bold subtitle/downtoner at the bottom; both are printed in black ink. On the second page, smaller and more detailed captions and subtitles are enclosed in parentheses and printed in light ink. The pages’ translucence and the varying degrees of opacity and clarity in the texts serve as gentle reminders that captions and subtitles differently
—Alison O’Daniel
Christine Sun Kim uses the medium of sound in performance and drawing to investigate her relationship with spoken languages and her aural environment. Selected exhibitions and performances include solo shows at White Space Beijing, London’s Carroll/Fletcher gallery, and De Appel, Amsterdam, alongside group shows at Serralves Museum, Sound Live Tokyo, the Berlin and Shanghai Biennials, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1 in New York. Kim was awarded TED and MIT Media Lab Fellowships.
Alison O’Daniel is a filmmaker and visual artist exploring sound, acoustics, access, and complex embodiment. Informed by her experiences of being hard of hearing and her collaborations with other Deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing composers, athletes, musicians, and performers, she explores new ways to navigate, deconstruct, and reimagine the aural world. O’Daniel and Kim have collaborated twice previously: Christine made a score for O’Daniel’s in-progress film The Tuba Thieves (2013– ongoing), and O’Daniel wrote captions for Kim’s project Closed Readings.