In a short essay titled 'The sound of temperature rising' in the edited book 'Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear' (Irene Revell and Sarah Shin), Christine Sun Kim writes of an artwork she made while pregnant with her first child, and while watching the devastation of Trump's first term as president. She elaborates, "Persistent droughts, floods and storms were marking the effects of climate change and a warming world. I felt these different kinds of rising temperatures intertwining, and used an open-ended musical notation to capture the feeling. When I draw musical staff lines, I use four lines instead of the standard five, which references how staff bars would be signed in American Sign Language (ASL) as four fingers pulled across the front of the body. Like my other mural and billboard works, I want the scale to actively impose Deaf people's existence and culture into the everyday lives of hearing people". Kim's drawing is evocative - four lines curve from the bottom of the page to the top right, and musical notes dance on either end. The line 'the sound of temperature rising' hovers above. Today, as I think about the multiplicity of weather during a satellite pass in Hackney Downs, and reflect on how much of the 'sound of temperature rising' is felt in our bodies, our lungs and other organs, Kim's artwork and words resonate powerfully.
Around halfway through the satellite pass, as the image creeps down my screen and the deep darkness of the Arctic circle gives way to a few pieces of lighter cloud and land, the satellite almost over London, a football player comes trotting over. He finds my tape measure Yagi antenna interesting, commenting, 'I never would have thought a tape measure could be so useful!'. When I point to my screen, he drops his chest and body to the field so fast it startles me, and for a moment he has his face a couple inches way from the slow-loading image. I become self-conscious of the layer of dust on my laptop which, combined with the glaring sunlight of the afternoon, makes the satellite image challenging to make out. Yet he hops up as quickly as he went down, and satisfied with his understanding, jogs away.