Taking back ownership around sound and those who make it.
Christine’s work came from an interpreted struggle with language barriers and not knowing their physical noise-making habits as a child. This has led to an explorative approach to physicality around sound in an art form that many sound-able people could find displacement with, even myself while watching, the objects selected were not of your typical artefacts around noise makers. It is encouraging to see that Christine was able to express their ownership around noise and how their disability was refracted as a tool to visualize the physicality of motion that sound makes, the beauty of this video was the first few minutes of Christine capturing daily life noises or as it’s classed as ‘Noise Pollution’ and interpreting that in a creative manner, seeing how they could express that noise through objects was very interesting and I am assuming took a lot of experimenting and exploration around emitters and motions that showed the same distractive noise that was happening during the traffic scenes.
As a Knitter and a sound-able person that uses sound awareness as part of my job, it is also a huge health concern for those in our industry that in time, we do have the possibility to lose our hearing due to the mechanical noises from machine usage and the acoustics of the room they live in. Although in the past, I did have a student who was fascinated between the motion and sound of the machines and captured the noise as a form of music, could it be used to express the dangers around this noise pollution a how we need to consider the balance of health and awareness around those who can hear and those who don’t.
Reflecting on this topic and this video, I have considered how I could reframe our health and safety induction around healthy machine usage (especially in large classes). How could I interact with students who don’t hear the noise the machine makes to show them, what I listen to as a technician, is a machine running ‘healthy’ and ‘weird’ or ‘abrasive’ sounds alert me to something is wrong while knitting
Vicky Hong – Textile designer
A link below brings you to one of our past pupils who documented the sounds the machine makes through a visual ‘pdf’ animated format.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CZeWtxBvqTr/
Textiles that can hear?
This new fabric can ‘hear’ sounds or broadcast them (Link)
This article is fascinating and something BA-level textile students should be exploring more often than just ‘fashion’ where science and art collide and how innovative practice can lead to game-changing technology that is benefiting human life.
