http://goo.gl/A13GdS
For artist Christine Sun Kim, sound is a "ghost." The multiple-MFA-holding Senior TED Fellow who has had a Whitney Museum residency and exhibited at MoMA, has been profoundly deaf since birth. The sonic hush in which she lives has pushed her towards exploring sound through her work in a varied oeuvre of performance, installation, drawing, and video.
Her information system make the rigid definition of sound as anesthetized vibrations meeting a hearing ear feel nothing short of antiquated. It does this by capturing life in a world where sound is funneled more through social interactions than through ears. Because of this, experiencing her work is similar to the moment when one realizes listening to the same song in the dark is different than hearing it in the light.
Kim's work is conceptually strong, but its real power comes from the way it honors and dignifies her own experience. In the perceptual regime that is hearing culture, Kim tells dominant sonic norms to go screw themselves. They represent a limiting etiquette, not her actual relationship with sound. As Kim pointed out in a past TED interview: "It was not like society gave me a clear, safe space to do whatever I wanted. I had to learn how to integrate their ways."