Seeing Voice The Seven-Tone Color Spectrum

On March 15 & 16, Christine Sun Kim, in collaboration with the Center for Experimental Lectures, will initiate a conversation led by seven presenters, all of whom will give a lecture without using audible voice. This is the final event in Feedback, Sun Kim’s six-part Session at Recess.

Throughout Feedback, Sun Kim, deaf since birth, has performed auditory investigations that initiate a slippage of audio into visual. Using non-vocal methods of dialogue to form collaborative vision with visitors to Recess and a cast of collaborators, the artist has created multiple aural perceptions through the use of bodies in motion, microphones, delay pedals, and more.

For the final iteration of Feedback, Isaac Newton’s alignment of the color wheel and the octave will serve as a point of departure for conversations that do not privilege audible voice. Each of the seven presenters is assigned a particular color/note.

Some presenters will use their assigned color/note as a place to begin research while others will focus on topics in and around individual voice. Each presenter will engage his or her own specific interests and varied backgrounds.

Coming from a variety of disciplines, presenters will offer research-based lectures that critically engage the notion of transmuted, embodied voice. They will employ projected images, laptops, tablets, the physical body, and other communicative tools that do not require their vocal chords.

Visitors are free to come and go as they please.

Presenters: Christine Sun Kim, R. E. H. Gordon, Tom Finkelpearl, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Marc Handelman, Stephen Lichty, R. Lyon, Jesse Prinz, Eugenie Tsai

Image: Newton’s color circle, from Opticks of 1704, showing the colors correlated with musical notes. The spectral colors from red to violet are divided by the notes of the musical scale, starting at D. The circle completes a full octave from D to D. Newton’s circle places red, at one end of the spectrum, next to violet, at the other. This reflects the fact that non-spectral purple colors are observed when red and violet light are mixed. Isaak Newton. Opticks. 1704, from Book I, Part II, Proposition VI, Problem 2. Feb. 21, 2013.