In this TED video, she explains how “through
her art, she discovered similarities between American Sign Language and music,
and she realized that sound doesn’t have to be known solely through the ears, it
can be felt, seen and experienced as an idea.”
She share a little bit about
the history of American Sign Language, ASL, plus
a bit of her own background. French sign language was brought to America
during the early 1800s, and as time went by, mixed with local signs, it
evolved into the language we know today as ASL. So
it has a history of about 200 years.
She
was born deaf, and
she was taught to believe that sound wasn't a part of her life. As
a Deaf person living in a world of sound, it's
as if she was living in a foreign country, blindly following its rules,
customs, behaviors and norms without ever questioning them.
She learn and mirror that behavior. At
the same time, she has learned that she create sound, and
has seen how people respond to her.
In Deaf culture, movement is equivalent to sound. This
is a sign for "staff" in ASL. A
typical staff contains five lines. Yet for her, signing it with my thumb sticking up
like that doesn't feel natural.
In the year 2008, she had the opportunity to
travel to Berlin, Germany, for an artist residency there. Prior
to this time, she had been working as a painter. During
this summer, she visited different museums and gallery spaces, and
as she went from one place to the next, she
noticed there was no visual art there. At that time, sound was trending, and this struck
her... there was no visual art, everything
was auditory.
Now sound has come into her art territory. She realized that doesn't have to be the case at
all. She actually know sound. She
knows it so well that it doesn't have to be something just
experienced through the ears. It could be felt tactually, or
experienced as a visual, or even as an idea.
She
decided to reclaim ownership of sound and
to put it into my art practice. And everything that I had been taught regarding
sound.
With sound as her new art medium, She
delved into the world of music. And she was surprised to see the similarities
between music and ASL. For example, a
musical note cannot be fully captured and expressed on paper. And
the same holds true for a concept in ASL. They're
both highly spatial and highly inflected, meaning that subtle changes can
affect the entire meaning of both signs and sounds. So it's amazing to see
how ASL is alive and thriving, just like music is.
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