Christine Sun Kim: Up and Away

Up and Away is a voice-controlled web game by sound and visual artist Christine Sun Kim that upends the status quo of how speech should sound and whose words are heard. Growing up, Kim played speech therapy games designed to reshape her Deaf voice and pronunciation to fit hearing norms. Now, she reimagines those same games, once a tactic for linguistic homogenization, as something thoughtful, fun, and on her own terms.

In the artist’s words, “there are zillions of voice control games in online popular culture where you must perfectly vocalize the musical scales to get the ball through multiple holes.” She further elaborates, “This made me think of a classic 1980s computer game called Up, Up, and Away that I played during many speech therapy sessions as a kid. I had to vocalize correctly to provide the right amount of wind for the hot air balloon to rise over the mountains, adjusting loudness, pitch, or duration. It might seem cute, but it was lowkey traumatic, especially since I was constantly corrected not only by a speech therapist but also by a computer.”

In Kim’s inverted version of a speech therapy game, players are challenged to adapt to her voice. According to her, “players will need to adjust to my voice to succeed. I will assign different non-speech sounds that I make with my mouth. A player first gets a tutorial to train themselves to sound like me,” and then receives feedback on how effectively they’ve echoed her vocals. Guided by Kim’s voice through indirect visual cues, players navigate Up and Away’s silent game environment without hearing the artist’s literal vocals. Instead, handwritten prompts—“AAA,” “MMM,” “OOO,” and “SMACK” (the latter noise representing a lip-smacking sound)—appear in the game’s lower bar.

The prompts that appear in the lower bar are chosen for their neutral connotations and similarity to the vocalizations Kim practiced in speech therapy. These cues invite players to vocalize them through trial and error, by exploring different pitches and pronunciations. The game experience is built around a machine learning model specifically trained on Kim's vocalization recordings. This model absorbs her vocal patterns and, during gameplay, actively listens to the player’s input to determine whether their voice aligns with hers.

Progress depends on how closely players replicate Kim’s tone and pronunciations. Success is measured by achieving a high score, indicating how far one travels through the digital landscape before deflating to the ground. Over time, repeated gameplay offers players a sense of accomplishment with each shareable score, while fostering a deeper understanding of speech and sound diversity.

Envisioned as an interactive art piece, infused with the artist’s signature visuals and sonics, Up and Away is both playful and subversive—creating an experimental relationship between listening and being heard that transcends audio. It prompts players to reconsider sound through an alternative lens, while challenging the hearing world’s linguistic dominance.

Watch Christine Sun Kim explain the backstory behind Up and Away and how to play on Hyundai Artlab’s Instagram Instagram .