I really love cartoons a lot, especially how malleable bodies and environments are. Sudden and drastic changes can occur in a short space of time which I think is a lot like the experience of being chronically sick. There is a predictable unpredictability about it. The morbid comedy of having a body is captured so well in cartoons. It also offers a world to escape into which doesn’t feel too exhausting to consume on low energy, because it’s fantasy, a playfully cutting reflection of the real world.

I have been totally drawn into this episode of Ren and Stimpy recently which highlights perfectly the ridiculousness of medical care, as well as the importance of caring for carers and the need for interdependent support systems.  

You can watch the episode in the embedded video above. It doesn’t have closed captions unfortunately but I found a transcript of the episode here.

I have included some screenshots below that I think are just SO beautiful for their colour palette and the way they illustrate the feelings of being sick, which I so strongly relate to. I love these images so much that I used them as my new website theme and I hope to turn them into memes about the sick experience one day..  

I wanted to be in the studio more over the past days but I got hit with a pain and migraine flare up. This usually involves at least three days of me lying in various positions, looking like I’m the slow-motion action replay of a football dive or foul. This image shows where I spent some of Saturday. It was FOUL.

I wanted to share here my previous experimental project called Partial Gestures. This is a short 16 second video of a cropped Youtube video that shows only the subtitles that appear in two lines at a time:

“Implanted her at the age of four and a half that she would be able to develop near natural speaking skills. Have you met other deaf people who are 20 to 35 years old and who got an implant as an adult out of our 300 patients we”

Hand movements are partially cropped and hidden behind the subtitle to hinder the audience from understanding the context. Behind the subtitle, there is a conversation happening between two people, one of which is using American Sign Language to ask a question. This video is originally from a documentary called ‘Sound & Fury’ directed by Josh Aronson in 2000. You can find more information on this wiki page here. The original video can be found on Youtube on here.

This documentary shows the journey of two sets of parents discussing the future of their children in regards to how much cochlear implant surgery may be ‘beneficial’ or how it could separate the child from one’s Deaf family.

I found the film relevant as Cochlear Implant can be controversially seen as something that ‘erases’ Deaf identity because it usually encourages one to speak and hear instead of using the sign language. At the time of first watching this documentary, I also came across a book titled Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children by Dr. Laura Mauldin. The book is about the consequences of Cochlear Implant surgery for parents and medical professionals and I found it to be quite informative for me. You can find more info about the book on here. I must’ve been about 10 or 11 when I received the surgery and I do not remember anything particular about what hearing sound was like before switching to digital hearing. As my hearing started to deteriorate from the age of 4, I don’t have much recollection of listening the music with natural hearing. It was intriguing to learn about how a child gets to train the brain to reconfigure the way of listening with new cochlear implant device.

The Co-Designing the Sound Art with Cochlear Implant Users workshop I attended at V&A in 2016 has helped me to understand more about CI and its users’ experiences. Lead by artist Dr. Tom Tlalim, the workshop included a series of interviews conducted to discuss the varied experience of music within Cochlear Implant users. This website showcases multiple interviews and information about the project which can be found here.

As I have been learning more about CI, I became naturally interested in the language of British Sign Language. The mini booklet I have made as a documentation of my journey into learning the British Sign Language alphabet through fingerspelling- it was printed by Berlin based Risograph printing studio WeMakeIt.

This booklet was selected to be part of Artist Self-Publishers fair 2020- as part of showcasing the book, I made Partial Gestures as the video experimentation to accompany this project.

I am looking forward to seeing how I can expand on this process of study and continue to think about the language of subtitle in engaging way through researching!

As someone who has to catheterise themselves regularly, due to my disability, I’m understandably quite into anything related to piss and urinating. I often use cardboard hospital bedpans in my work and simulate pissing in live performances.

A pissing contest or pissing match, as many probably already know, is an idiom that describes a situation where two or more people are competing with each other to show superiority, usually pointlessly.

I was happy to discover that pissing contests also exist in a literal sense where participants compete to see who can piss the longest, farthest, highest or most accurately. There are even Guinness World Records held in the sport. A woman in Italy is the current world record holder for the farthest piss created a 30 foot golden arch, although I can’t find her name.

Not only that, during combat, lobsters accompany their largest blows with a large squirt of piss out of their faces. Their bladders are located in their heads and they have nozzles under their eyes and antennae, where they release urine to communicate during mating or fighting.

When watching films, I have often paid attention to subtitles that show sound effects such as:

BBC Academy has online guidelines for subtitles that would be shown across its platforms. I found this line interesting under the Music and songs section – “All music that is part of the action, or significant to the plot, must be indicated in some way.”

Description of music can prepare us for what is about to happen in a film – examples of this are subtitles such as EERIE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYS, TENSE MUSIC PLAYS, SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYS. It can also tell us what the person is feeling – such as HEROIC MUSIC, DRAMATIC MUSIC SWELLS, SENTIMENTAL MUSIC.

I recently watched the well-known 1982 film Blade Runner, during which I noticed that while dramatic music was played, it was shown as (***) – how does (***) convey the atmosphere of the music that is being played? There are cases where the subtitle can be clever with showing context but its importance can be easily neglected.

Regulations for closed captioning started to be introduced in the UK in the 1990s to make video content accessible for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Whilst in the USA, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, following which the majority of network providers of programs had to contribute part of their income on captioning to ensure access to verbal information on televisions and films. In 1993 with the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 going into effect, TV receivers with picture screens that were 13 inches or larger that were imported in the US had to have built-in decoder circuitry to show closed captions. Decoders used to be sold for $250 at Sears in the 1980s which meant they were not very accessible for some people. Closed captioning started out as an experiment intended only for people who were deaf, yet it became something of an everyday commodity that helped millions of people to connect. A brief history of CC can be found here.

When I was younger, I remember renting VHS tapes from Blockbusters with my family. Specifically, I remember trying to select ones that had the CC logo on them to ensure that I can watch them without worrying. Fast-forwarding to 2021, unfortunately, not all 100% of UK TV shows/films and online video services have subtitles. The UK charity The Royal National Institute for Deaf People (previously known as Action on Hearing Loss) currently has a campaign called Subtitle It! which has been tackling the issue since 2015.

There is still a long way to make existing/future web content fully accessible for everyone- but I am glad there are resources that we can learn from regarding accessibility.

I’m interested in why some sports are considered posher than others or more worthy of being featured in large sporting events.

I can’t understand why basketball dunking competitions aren’t in the Olympics. Not that I really like, care about or follow the limpics, but I feel strongly that dunking is underrated in comparison to other sports.

Dunking is an impressive and breathtaking combination of long jump, high jump, basketball, gymnastics and choreography. I could watch the high-definition slow-motion replays on Dunk League for hours. I wish they’d make another series.

A long-term enthusiasm of mine is mascot costumes. I have a collection of images on my laptop and phone of my favourites. I especially like Tweety for reasons I will explain in a later post.

I like mascots because they are a non-athletic and often surreal comedy presence in an atmosphere which is otherwise very focused on sporting physical ability. Their bodies are so jarring and out of place in these arenas of polished flexing muscles. They are often wrinkly, misshapen, oversized and furry. Anonymous. ANONYMOUS. Hiding in plain site. Now there is a sporting body that I can relate to.

They sometimes race each other to raise money for charity and dance to motivate the crowd (especially in the US), but the focus is still on the humour of their costumes and characters. Most are animal or human-like characters but my favourites are the more surreal choices like, Boiler Man of West Bromwich Albion and the angry looking sunburst, Kingsley, for Partick Thistle, both pictured below.

Head over to my studio to see some more mascot oddy-body memes I made, like the one at the top of the page.

Glass / Glas by Bert Haanstra (1958) is a short documentary that playfully shows the process of glassmaking. This is a compilation of stills featuring hands from the video for visual inspiration. I always have been interested in the movement of hands as they can give a surprising amount of information regarding one’s culture, emotions, and the context of the conversation that is taking place.

Thanks Laura Lulika for the reference!

I find the theatrics of men’s footy and ‘time-wasting’ simultaneously irritating and comical. It’s not surprising that in the less popular and historically less lucrative Women’s footy, the players spend less time pretending to be hurt.

The performance of ‘being fouled’ reminds me of the need to perform disability in certain situations. This is something that we shouldn’t have to do but are sometimes forced into so that we are considered worthy of the care we need. Of course the circumstances and reasons are wildly different to the multimillion pound ‘beautiful game’ but the ridiculousness isn’t so far apart.

In a system that is constantly trying to catch you out and take away the very limited and basic support and care you’re entitled to, sometimes you have to show them what it’s like on your worst day. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is known for spying on disabled people and wrongly accusing them of fraud, taking them to court, siezing their property, rejecting appeals for support in their unfair ‘Fit to Work’ assessments and causing thousands of deaths of sick and disabled people every year. Sick and disabled people live in fear of being not disabled enough or the wrong kind of disabled. Either too scared to apply for any support in the first place or living in fear of having their support taken away.

I wonder, what do we have to do to be believed? Should I throw myself on the ground and weep in front of you, my face in my hands, grasping at every part of me that hurts? It’s foul!

When I was researching subtitles, I was surprised to learn about the vocabulary of Closed Captions and Subtitles.

Closed Caption is for viewers who cannot hear audio and includes sound effects.

The subtitle is for viewers who can hear audio but cannot understand the language and does not include audio effects.

Most countries outside the USA and Canada tend to merge the two words into one in film and media which explains why I found it confusing!

I also found that Open Caption means it is permanently embedded into the video itself- so it cannot be turned off by the viewer, but that means its style/size/colour can be determined by the creator ahead of time.

Continuing my research, I watched a short documentary called The Invisible Subtitler made in 2013. The documentary discusses the importance of the role of translating subtitles into different languages for films. It is available to watch on Youtube.

The act of translation always fascinates me as one always has to take everything into context to make the best translation. When I was learning English for the first time, I had to memorize definitions of new English words in Korean words. As I learned more about English, I realised that one English word does not always have a single Korean word when translated.

Like language, sound can also be translated in many different ways. In subtitles, the sound can be summed up into a single word or detailed description. It depends on the choice of subtitler or scriptwriter. There are times when the subtitle can just show as (MUSIC) or it can be showing in details such as the title of the music and its lyrics.

Yesterday I enjoyed spending the day exploring archival film footage found at London’s Screen Archives. One thing I have noticed during my research so far is the abundance of content – it’s great to see that so much is readily available. For the next few days, I will continue exploring the collection to get inspired for the visual research.

If there’s any suggestions or references I could research regarding subtitles, please let me know!

Did you know that when you look up synonyms for the word ‘athletic’ it suggests; ‘frail, weak, infirm, delicate’.

Antonyms include, ‘muscly, well built, strong, fit, healthy’ and… ‘able-bodied’..

As if to suggest that disabled people could not also be athletic or hyperable at the same time, that they are mutually exclusive. Of course we know this not to be true but we rarely see examples of this in mainstream media, unless it is for inspiration porn.

This is why I have chosen to use the term, ‘hyperable’ instead of the word ‘athletic’. Too often this body type is considered the norm, the average or what is considered ‘healthy’ in our Western society and media. Everyone else’s experiences of their body, who don’t fit into this category, are somehow deemed less than. I want to highlight, through the language and terminology that I use, that all body types are of course valid and that being athletic or hyperable is a choice to push your body into a form that is in most cases, beyond what is necessary to survive. You have made yourself, in some way, ‘hyper-able.’

Bodies are more complicated than the binaries of athletic or weak, fast or slow, healthy or unhealthy. They are soft and leaky, strong and vulnerable, uncooperative and reliably inconsistent. They contain emotions and memories. We can adorn them with the symbols of who we are and connect with ourselves and others through them. Where are the celebratory arena sized events for these bodies? The non-normative normal bodies.  

Besides, the word athlete comes from ancient Greek words that mean, ‘one who competes for a prize’ so in some sense we can all be athletes if we really want to be. I won a goldfish on the fair once.