Manchester International Festival (MIF), one of the world’s leading incubators of cutting-edge art, returned in July 2021 for a city-wide takeover centered on culture, creativity, and connection. As part of its rich and lively public art offering, MIF commissioned Captioning the City by sound artist Christine Sun Kim. The installation developed as a series of enormous captions that were wrapped around buildings, streets, a boat, and even flown from a plane.

Ahead of the 18-day event, Kim researched the cultural landscape of Manchester to create descriptive texts that she felt captured the fabric of the city:

[The sound of patting yourself on the back for being on time] 

[The sound of agreeing never to call it soccer] 

[The sound of perfecting hand movements] 

“I am pretty obsessed with sound captions I see on screen,” said the artist, who uses her experience of deafness to investigate how sound operates in society. “I saw how much they have evolved in the last thirty years; from no sound captions to (music) to (mournful flute music).”

Many people have encountered captions in some form or another; from the CC toggle button on YouTube videos to burnt-on text in movies. But unlike subtitles, captions exist to convey more than just spoken dialogue. They include critical non-speech elements, such as vocal gestures, background noise, and descriptions of diegetic and non-diegetic music.

The Office of Communications, the regulatory body for UK television broadcasting, recorded that 18% of viewers regularly watch TV with closed captions, but only 20% of those were D/deaf or hard of hearing. “This indicates that captions are no longer strictly about accessibility and I have found that they can be used as a medium in my practice,” said Kim. “I want people to consider that sound captions shouldn't be limited to sonic properties only, but also things, emotions, times, thoughts.”

Kim’s practice uses everything from written text and musical notations to American Sign Language to explore our relationship to sound, verbal language, and the wider environment. By taking captions out of their familiar contexts, her work tacitly reframes sound as a collection of memories and sensations that invite audiences to see the world in a new dimension. Kim summarises, “I want these works to actively impose Deaf people’s existence and culture into the everyday lives of hearing people.”