Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better

Amid the rise of at-home and handheld-device streaming, closed captions are having a moment. But, as the US-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim explores in the short film [Closer Captions], the descriptions they offer are rarely up to snuff, especially for Deaf people like her who rely on them. A playful dive into a form of communication that many rarely give a second thought to, in this short Kim explains why we shouldn’t settle for ‘[music]’ when we could have ‘[mournful violin music that sounds like crying alone in an empty bar]’. She then presents a short film in which she uses captions to draw out poetry from life’s small moments, describing, for instance, a shower as ‘the sound of shampoo scent floating among the fog’. The result is both a sharp commentary on the technology and an evocative glimpse into Kim’s unique perspective on sound, words and life.