Do You Hear What I Hear?, performance art, 2010

I received my second cochlear implant in 2009. I was in graduate school at the time and my classmates and friends kept asking me what sound was like through the cochlear implant. Actually, sound heard through the implants changes over time as your brain figures out what to do with it, but at that time it was still kind of tinny and echoey. I wanted to do a performance piece that would attempt to replicate what I was hearing, so I bought an old karaoke machine and a couple of metal oil barrels. The two barrels and the karaoke machine, linked by cables, are intended to mimic the structure of hearing – two ears and a brain. I would climb inside one of the barrels and read passages from The Tempest into a microphone hooked up to the karaoke machine.