Date:
Location:
SOUND/TEXT
SPEAKER: Mara Mills, NYU
In 2012, Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich published “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies,” a manifesto hailing deaf sonic expertise and anti-audist philosophies of sound. 2012 also marked the opening of two landmark exhibits that helped launch a new disability arts movement as well as the career of sound and visual artist Christine Sun Kim: What Can a Body Do?, curated by Amanda Cachia at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, and Gesture Sign Art (Kunstraum Kreuzberg), described by curators Wolfgang Müller and An Paenhuysen as “the first exhibition in the world to present works of art that take shape at the interstices of deaf and hearing culture.” Kim finished her MFA in sound art at Bard college in 2013; that same year, her work was featured in Soundings: A Contemporary Score, the first large-scale sound art exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
My talk for the “Sounding (Out) Access” series considers Kim’s engagement with sound across visual media, and the ways her work has evolved over the past decade alongside the burgeoning disability arts field. Kim has moved from disability aesthetics to the aesthetics of access to a distinctive catalog of graphemes and diagrams that relate sound to gesture, history, labor, quantification, and debt. I use Kim’s lexicon to ask, “After sound studies meets Deaf Studies, what next?”
About the Speaker
Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and founding co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is also a founding editorial board member of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is recently co-editor of Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford 2020), Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU 2023), and a forthcoming special issue of Osiris on "Disability and the History of Science" (July 2024). Other upcoming publications include the NSF-funded edited collection How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU 2024), a coauthored book with Jonathan Sterne on time stretching, and an NEH-funded collaborative research project with Michele Friedner on "The Global Cochlear Implant."