Sound often comes with anticipation, waiting to be performed and sometimes detached from its origin. The Grid of Prefixed Acousmatics is based on the concept of “acousmatic” sound, or sound that is heard, but with no visible source. This concept resonates with the French composer and writer Pierre Schaeffer’s “sound object” (l’objet sonore) theory, which describes how sound becomes an independent “object,” functioning without considering its origins. This allows any sound to be played from any source.

—Christine Sun Kim

The “acousmatic” experience is akin to sound captions in movies and on television that notate off-screen sounds whose origins may remain visually unidentifiable. Kim has always perceived sound as a transitory object. Deaf since birth, Kim has extensive experience with interpreters and captions, and for her, some sounds have developed secondary origins. During the process of translating, interpreters require a very brief delay to accurately sign what they hear, creating a sense of anticipation and perhaps a bit of abstraction. The sounds interpreters and captioners convey are technically acousmatic, but when Kim sees and reads them, they return to a non-acousmatic form and are “seen” again, but in a different and compressed form.

For this ceramic project, Kim found clay to be the ideal medium to describe the non-acousmatic form of both interpreters and captioners, because of its visual and tangible elements. Presenting acousmatic sounds as clay objects is essentially an act of cementing sounds, just as interpreters and captioners transform certain sounds into actions. When Kim looked up a list of prefixes in order to find the right one to describe her acousmatic experience, she realized that a number of them, such as “post-” and “anti-,” seem fitting. She developed a list of prefixed acousmatics and shaped them into small abstract and representational sculptures. The bases and handwritten labels convey a sense of each sculpture’s place in the grid and its meaning, lending a dictionary-like quality to the installation.