Alison O’Daniel Joins UC San Diego as Suraj Israni Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Cinematic Arts

Story by:

• Erika Johnson- [email protected]

Topics covered:

• School of Arts and Humanities
• Department of Visual Arts
• Institute of Arts and Humanities
• Cinematic arts
• Filmmaking

Share This:

Article Content

The field of filmmaking is just 150 years old. For Alison O'Daniel, this relative infancy is rife with opportunity for invention. A visual artist and filmmaker who is d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing, O'Daniel is redefining how accessibility is approached in film by studying the social and sonic politics of filmmaking and viewing and the act of listening across multiple mediums. She recently joined UC San Diego as the inaugural Suraj Israni Chancellor's Endowed Chair in Cinematic Arts, the first endowed chair position to be established in the Department of Visual Arts.

The new faculty position is made possible through the generosity of Deepak and Varsha Israni. In 2021, the Israni family made a $6 million gift in memory of their son, Suraj, an aspiring filmmaker. Five million dollars was dedicated to the launch of the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts in the School of Arts and Humanities, a hub for research, scholarship, teaching, production and exhibition of film and moving-image arts. And $1 million of the gift established an endowed faculty chair to support the teaching, research and service of a distinguished faculty member focused on cinematic arts.

O'Daniel is already developing her second feature film project, which the endowed chair funds will help support, in addition to her teaching. The film is titled, "Inframince," a French word first coined by the artist Marcel Duchamp in 1912 that refers to ultra-thin, ephemeral or undecidable phenomena. O'Daniel's film calls attention to aural power structures on a global scale, including the weaponization of sound. These impacts reverberate, yet can be easily overlooked at the same time.

O'Daniel offers several examples of when this happens. For instance, there are high-frequency devices called "mosquito alarms" used in Berry, New South Wales, and Tokyo, Japan, that emit sound to discourage teenagers from loitering in public places - the high frequency is often undetectable by adults whose hearing naturally declines with age. She also cited the practice of police forces that use long range acoustic devices to stop protestors from gathering, and residents exposed to incessant noise pollution in urban neighborhoods located underneath flight paths.

In her research, O'Daniel studies the aesthetic, spatial and aural interpretations, sensibilities and experiences of sound and its varied perceptions among audiences. She is at the forefront of developing dynamic forms of communication that make moving-image stories more enriching for hearing and non-hearing audiences alike.

Whereas film has historically been defined by a particular able-bodied experience of sight, sound, logic and emotion, O'Daniel is expanding the use of open captioning as well as integrating embodied storytelling, engaging more of the body's sensory inputs in seeing, hearing and feeling the story.

"Filmmaking has become formulaic to appeal to a wide audience, and accessibility often gets left out of the conversation," said O'Daniel. "My work is expanding historical approaches to captioning and access through hybrid storytelling forms that combine narrative, documentary and art installation to raise awareness and explode film language."

Her latest film project employs both documentary and narrative storytelling as well as multi-sensory perception through the use of tactile sound design. She explained, "You can design sound to move spatially around the room. You can feel sub frequency. And you can play with the narrative structure so that the story is perceived intuitively and sensorially rather than relying completely on the plot."

O'Daniel introduces her students to accessible sound design from her own Deaf and disabled community perspective. One way she demonstrates this concept in the classroom is by replicating what she does in film screenings: she gives the audience and each student a balloon that they hold while watching a film. The small addition activates another sense - feeling the sound waves passing over the balloon's surface - a form of embodied listening. This honors a tradition in Deaf clubs where Deaf viewers watched films using balloons as speakers.

"We each receive film differently," said O'Daniel. "I'm always sharing with my students what it means to make something that can truly reach a wide audience. There's a place for us to make work that reaches really specific communities; I encourage students to bravely speak in their respective languages."