_Seeing is also a movement_01
2019
SEEING IS ALSO A MOVEMENT_01 / RCA ( London, UK)
Maurice Blanchot´s original fragments and quotes from his book "The Infinite Conversation" act in this project like the sources from which to activate a cascade of unorthodox readings, mistranslations and rewritings of the same information. Online apps and services such as Google Translate or music software are used here in combination with more traditional mediums and languages like Painting or Morse code to "read" and activate the resulting information. The outcoming works raise questions about agency, obsolescence and our ambivalent relationship to the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and machine learning in our daily life.
Throughout a polyphony of surfaces and echoes, the works in this show explore many ways of writing, coding, reading and rewriting, examining therefore how we relate to information, communication and attention. Among these works, we find poems "written" by the neuronal network behind Google Translate, music generated through online free apps reading erased pages of books, infinite conversations in Morse code between dead authors and machines. Language, as well as optical media, can both illuminate and obscure, reveal and conceal, as we find today in issues such as social networks, fake news, machine learning and cryptography.
These works conceive every translation as a movement between codes, languages and fields. In parallel, they require active movement around the space from the spectator and involvement from the viewer to unfold all the possible readings, resonances and loops. These repeated "translational gestures" highlight that even the most radical form of erasure or translation is nothing but a kind of rewriting from which new grammars might happen to arise.
Infinite Conversation (2019), is a 2-channel video and sound piece presented at my degree show at the RCA (London). It is based on different ways of rewriting, encoding and mistranslating an original quote from Maurice Blanchot's "The Infinite Conversation".
The original quote ("seeing is also a movement") is translated into Morse code and introduced in Google Translate (which doesn't recognize the language). As a result, it triggers a weird dadaist poem about time, presence, absence and repetition.
The video/sound piece displays a conversation in an infinite loop between 2 audio tracks "speaking" in Morse code. The first of them encode the original quote, the second one, do so with part of the poem resulting from Google Translate's mistranslation. The Morse frequencies trigger on both screens fragments of marks and brushstrokes operating as a language or score, mirroring the conversation overlapping on the speakers.
Maurice Blanchot's original fragments and quotes from his book "The Infinite Conversation" act in this project like the sources from which to activate a cascade of unorthodox readings, mistranslations and rewritings of the same information. Online apps and services such as Google Translate or music software are used here in combination with more traditional mediums and languages like Painting or Morse code to "read" and activate the resulting information. The outcoming works raise questions about agency, obsolescence and our ambivalent relationship to the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and machine learning in our daily life.
Language, as well as optical media, can both illuminate and obscure, reveal and conceal, as we find today in issues such as social networks, fake news, machine learning and cryptography. These repeated "translational gestures" highlight that even the most radical form of erasure or translation is nothing but a kind of rewriting from which new grammars might happen to arise.
