In this short film, I reflect on our earlier reading and discussion of McLuhan's ideas regarding "seeing as believing" replacing "hearing as believing." I was particularly drawn to these ideas as hearing and seeing have always been compromised for me- I wear glasses and hearing aids, and have heavily relied on them since elementary school. Because of this, understanding what goes on around me is a constant balancing act. While my hearing aids allow me to amplify the world around me in order to understand speech, background noise of any kind compromises my ability to focus on one single conversation, video, or other auditory experience. Similarly when watching films, I always have to struggle between relying on my eyes or ears to understand- often, my ears are not up to the job of parsing out voices onscreen when there are usually other sounds, both onscreen and in my environment, which distract me. Yet if I am watching TV with live captions or movies which have been poorly captioned, my reliance on the words which flash at the bottom of the screen becomes a hindrance once gaps and misspellings create further misunderstanding.
Because of this, I wanted to attempt to recreate that feeling of sensory overload and confusion in my video. I filmed various friends reading from the passage of the Medium is the Massage which inspired these ideas, but added in background noise from my own hearing aid feedback, muted some of the speech, and kept the running motor of my car as an undertone to the entire video. I chose to start and end the film with the actions of putting in my hearing aids/starting the motor and then turning off the motor and removing my hearing aids to signify the way the world's noises rush in at me whenever I put in my "ears." Finally, I added captioning after making the viewers rely on lip reading to show how much of a reliance can be developed on them, only to garble the text in the next shot so as to point out the frustration of being unable to follow in your chosen (or perhaps forced) way of comprehension.
I really enjoyed your film. I thought it was very effective to make it a circular structure, starting with the insertion of your hearing aids and then ending with taking them out. It makes this a very concise illustration of what it's like to step into your world.
ReplyDeleteI thought that you did a good job with connecting your video to McLuhan's ideas and I can tell that you put a lot of time into the planning part of your video. I think it's neat that viewers are able to feel what it's like to experience some of the frustrations that you have to go through on a daily basis.
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