The California-based artist and filmmaker Nicole Miller is known for creating videos and multimedia installations that address what it means to be alive, specifically the brilliance and the precariousness of life in a Black body. On the occasion of the opening of Nicole Miller: A Sound, a Signal, the Circus at the Kemper Art Museum on March 26, 2022, Miller spoke about her practice and contextualized the major new commissioned project within her body of work.  

In her installation, Miller explores and expands an understanding of synesthesia—a perceptual phenomenon where one sense is experienced through another—as it relates to Black experience in the United States. Through an intricate choreography of sound, moving image, and laser-light animation, the artist enacts what she describes as a kind of “ecstatic translation” in which the heightened, interior sensory experience of being in a Black body is transmuted into something external and destabilizing.