In science there seems to be only one way to speak. Why? WTF, How come? And what can we do about it?
There’s nothing about English that makes it intrinsically better for
science than any other language. Science could have gone just as far in
Chinese or Swahili.
Having
a single global language of science makes the whole endeavour more
efficient.
There are around 6,000 languages in the world, today. If
science were being conducted in all of them, a lot of knowledge would be
lost. Is this so? Not necessarily.
In countries where English isn’t spoken, you shut out
everyone but the well-educated. We could be losing some really smart
minds.
We need a common language to communicate in science, and this is now
English. That is a good thing, because English is perfect for science:
it’s precise and straightforward. A good level of English will help you
to get the job or the project that you want, in both academia and
industry.This is simply the status quo, but not a given.
Students’ lack of ability to speak clearly in English is often perceived
as a lack of ability to think clearly about science, and that is wrong.
Locals understand the problem better than does a
scientist who has never been to the area, and that knowledge matters
whether it’s expressed in Hindi or English.
Language support and translation services could be built
into grants.
We need to embrace linguistic diversity and to make a concerted effort
to dig up scientific knowledge in languages other than English.
Gender roles and appreciation changed enormously because homophobe
european explorers utilized homophobic language to express their
disapproval, of indigenous third genders and non-heterosexual
sexualities.
Stephen, Lynn. “Sexualities and Genders in Zapotec Oaxaca.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 29, no. 2, 2002.
Allison Parrish (New York University), a computer programmer, poet and game designer, is reading her poetry derived from A Gutenberg Poetry Corpus 35min. in her talk Experimental Creative Writing with the Vectorized Word, from 2017.
Poetry is language that calls attention to its own esthetic properties. … My poetry
doesn’t mean anything, it’s about how it makes your brain feel, she says in the talk. Strange and promissing.
Her poems are the output of a computer program that
extracts linguistic features from over two million lines of public
domain poetry, then traces fluid paths between the lines based on their
similarities. They are published in the book ARTICULATIONS (2018) by Counterpath Press, Via the following image you can also get a taste.
Vector representations, poetry generation, phonetic similarities,
nearest-neighbor search … a human, a computer
I find it fascinating, especially because
what seems to be machinic is in fact deeply sensitive to me. It
prompts the old question where is the esthetic “hidden” in generated art. How
comes I like this so much? Is it about patterns and changes, about surprises, about human selection of variables and/or results ….
Listen to a fable (Aesop) in a lot of different Frenches :) Les langues françaises : Une même fable d'Ésope peut être écoutée et lue en français et en langues régionales.
On peut retrouver les créoles et de nombreuses
langues des Outre-mer, les langues non-territoriales illustrées,
comme le ®romani et la langue des signes française .
Créole réunionnais (des Hauts) Soley avek le van té apré esey kalkulé kisa lé plu for ant zot deu. “Ma
mont aou sé mwin lé plu for la”, di le van. Mi sa fer tir granmonn la
son palto plu vit ou seré kapab. Alor le van la komans souflé, for, for
minm. Oplus lu té soufl, oplus le granmonn i garoté alu dan son palto.
Aforstan le van la fatigé, in mandoné lu la arété. Alor soley la komans
pwaké, san tardé la shaler la komans monté, le granmonn la tir son
palto. Alor le van té oblijé arkonèt sé solèy té le plu for ant zot deu
Montpellier (Languedocien) : La
cisampa e lo solelh s'atissavan, cadun afortissent qu'èra lo mai fòrt,
quand vegèron un viatjaire que s'avançava, tot emmantelat. Se metèron
d'acòrd que lo qu'arribariá lo primièr de faire quitar son mantèu au
viatjaire, seriá lo mai fòrt. Alara, la cisampa se metèt a bufar, a
bufar de tota sa fòrça, mès dau mai bofava, dau mai lo viatjaire sarrava
son mantèu contra eu e a la fin, la bisa renoncièt de l'i faire quitar.
Alara lo solelh comencèt a brilhar e al cap d'un moment, lo viatjaire,
tot rescaufat, quitèt son mantèu. Atau, la cisampa deguèt ben
reconéisser que lo solelh èra lo mai fòrt dels dos.
“My aunt, the one who is pure, was always known as the one who is gracious, but on her gravestone it says the one who brings joy.”
Nicoline van Harskamp. In 2003 I saw the performance English Forecast in a Tate online performance series. It was announced as exploring the variation and future of spoken English.
At the time I was impressed but wasn’t completely open to it’s
importance because I was very critical of what Tate was calling online
performance. But I started following Harskamps work and I am very glad I did.
…She actively looks for the traces that different “Englishes” carry, of
place, class, crisis, trauma or displacement. Language is an elastic,
pregnant material to her, and much of her work is interested in what she
calls “linguistic biographies”… Skye Arundhati Thomas says about her in ‘Once you start thinking about names as language, people get very upset or very excited’ an interview with Harskamp for Studio International in 2019. It was a good read and I want to share some of the ideas Harskamp expressed in the interview:
In a way, native-like English is minor compared to the other types of
Englishes in the world. A focus on these is a great opportunity to set
English free from its centre. And this is where my interest in spoken
word comes from. Because it’s the only playground we might still have
left.
A majority of people working in the art world strive for a “native
English” and consider their own English to be a broken or faulty
language, but I do think that this is a language, or even a medium of
its own. It should be recognised and developed as such. I think a lot
about what could happen to English in the future, especially if everyone
could contribute to it. What if, instead of learning it in school, we
learn it in the way we speak it with each other?
“Accent” implies that the English being spoken is affected by the person
speaking it. I would say, instead, that English affects the person. I
am not interested in “native English”. I am interested in the vehicular
language – those we use in the absence of a shared language.
About PDGN a 16 min video from 2016 (PDGN a future link language built up from the ruins of today’s global English) she says:
PDGN takes as its premise: we are in a post-capitalist society,
and people are recycling buildings and material from this era – our
capitalist era – and there is also some leftover language. They are
trying to build something from the ruins of English, so to speak.
Lately she concentrates on thinking about names as language in My Name is Language; a series of ongoing live performances on location started in 2018.
All over the world, the old
establishment keeps the names of the ancestors but in the lower
socioeconomic class, names are more subject to fashion. Self-naming is a
powerful tool. Socrates pointed out that only slaves cannot name
themselves.
Names can be stabilised and canonised
like languages. The more complex the social structure, the more fixed
the names. The system needs an exact label to take your taxes, to punish
you, to send you to the military, to monitor your data. But if
references were all I cared about, I might as well be named with
numbers.
PDGN trailer 2016. PDGN is a fiction video that portrays a future in which the world is no longer run by national governments or global corporations, and that is neither utopian nor dystopian. A new link language is developing between people across this world through voluntary self-instruction.
Nicoline Harskamp pointed to two influential feminist fiction books that propose systems of language-change: Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue (1984). More to read. Thanks Nicoline.
Marcus Briggs-Cloud: “But
when I became a teenager, I looked around and I didn’t see anyone
younger than me that could speak our language,”, and so he initiated Ekvn-Yefolecv [ee-gun yee-full-lee-juh] an Intentional Indigenous Ecovillage Community
materializing on Maskoke ancestral homelands in what’s known commonly
and colonially as Weogufka (Murky Water), Alabama.
Instead of introducing, in order to meet modern life needs, new words in the Maskoke vocabulary he proposed to decolonize, to stay with the language and to evolve in accordance with the natural world.
Languages
reflect the worldview and culture of those who speak it, and Maskoke is
no different. The young Maskoke speakers struggled to express their
experiences with capitalism because it’s antithetical to the Maskoke
language and ethos. Collective ownership of anything other than one’s
body parts and family is constrained by the grammatical structure of the
language. You wouldn’t denote personal ownership over land, for
example.
VocableCode The work is setup as side by side, not to
privilege the back/front but to see them together as critical
interfaces, as codework, as computational art, as e-lit. I, says Soon, and I, Annie, agree, really like
all the voices that overlap with one another, repeatedly creating the
chaos and orders and help me to think about how to queer the world. Winnie Soon on fb. Take a look and be convinced! https://dobbeltdagger.net/VocableCode/
Vocable Code, is a project by Winnie Soon, a Denmark-based
Hong King artist-researcher who is interested in the
cultural implications of technologies, specifically concerning internet
censorship, automation, data circulation, real-time processing/liveness,
infrastructure and the culture of code practice.
In the interview “Winnie Soon, Time, Code, and Poetry” by Eva Heisler in Asymptote Journal she also speaks about this project:
The project is inspired by Geoff Cox’s 2013 book Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression.
The chapter “Vocable Code,” co-written with Alex McLean, argues that
code is speechlike, with expressive and performative qualities. Along
this line of thinking, my work Vocable Code examines the
entanglement of human and nonhuman voices, including human voices that
are stored in a computer format and operated through a formal logical
structure. There are computerized voices, too, with translation, and
they perform in real-time when the program code is executed. Apart from
that, the source code is written as a form of poetry, which is highly
readable and expressive as a piece of written language, but it is
executable at the same time. The attention to “voice” is to explore the
agency of such entanglement.
….
The source code does not prioritize efficiency, and that means some
of the code and functions are not “useful” at all, and even might be
considered redundant from a computer science perspective, but I use
decimals and many other custom-variable names as a queer way to
foreground the conceptual and political voice of a programmer. For
example, one of my favorite lines below shows the use of variable names
and the function “abs,” which means absolute but is not functionally
useful, as the code can run without this syntax. However, if you speak
these lines of code aloud, you will immediately recognize code is not as
alienated as many people think, and it is highly readable and poetic.
If (gender == abs(2)) { SpeakingCode(queers[WhoIsQueer].iam.makingStatements); }
La traduction est souvent perçue comme un concept essentiellement
métaphorique dans les mondes de l’art : les idées sont traduites en
œuvres peintes, sculptées, sonores. Insaisissable dans sa forme, la
traduction décrit la trajectoire entre les pensées de l’émetteur et les
sens des récepteurs, cet espace entre projet et produit que l’on nomme
processus. En arts numériques, toutefois, l’intervention de la machine
ajoute plusieurs couches de transfert linguistique bien tangibles à
cette transformation.
La programmation in vivo est assurément une forme de traduction multimodale et plurilingue, peu importe les langues et les langages utilisés.
Rodrigo Velasco, alias yecto, originaire de la ville
d’Ecatepec, aux abords de Mexico, intègre des mots en
zapoteco, en nahuatl, en espagnol et en français à ses performances,
mélangeant un éventail de référents culturels qui confondent images
acoustiques et visuelles, points de départ et destinations. Selon lui,
cette forme de traduction relève de la translation : on fait passer le
sens à travers différents codes, et c’est comme ça que celui-ci se
construit et se transforme.
Utterings is a sound-only networked performance experiment
where six artists while blindfolded, commit to a 30 min long exchange across distance. They engage in utterings
as communication, building on solo’s, duo’s, chorales and silence,
creating an on the fly “new” language, that forwards attention, trust
and affects above rationality. Six sound streams
are interlaced and entangled in one single polyphonic composition. The protocol for this performance has
been written collectively in the week before the performance. Utterings is a collaborative attempt to go beyond the borders and closures created by languages, opening up and transgressing these in a performance that probes meaning through pre-language communication and formerly un-inhabited expressions.
Utterings is a project by Annie Abrahams (FR) and Daniel Pinheiro (PT) with Constança Carvalho Homem (PT), Curt Cloninger (US), Nerina Cocchi (BE) and Derek Piotr (US) as invited artists and collaborators. Technical assistance by Jan de Weille.
After this first performance Utterings became a group with a website Utterings.
22/2 2020 16h30 Paris time, Audioblast #8, APO-33.
Protocol: No rehearsals, only a sound test and a mental preparation / an attunement. Just before connecting, we will all listen individually to Pauline Oliveros for 15 minutes. https://youtu.be/U__lpPDTUS4 * 16h Paris time connection via zoom. Sound testing. Disconnection 16h15. (16h21 Annie starts zoom again and Jan starts BUTT connection.) * 16h25 Re-connection to zoom by all. Putting on blindfolds. * 16h30 Start. In Nantes and on the radio Julien will introduce us, but we won’t hear it. * 30 min of Utterings. Anyone of us six can start - if we have in-between silences, another random person initiates the follow-up. When zoom stops we will know it ended.We disconnect. We will reconnect 5 min later again to say goodbye.
we are not making music - it may be boring and that is ok - don’t have ideas about what would be “good”
References: Pauline Oliveros, Mikhail Bakhtin, Andrei Bely, Maree Cunnington,
Michel De Certeau, Andrea Olsen, Meredith Monk, Maurizio Lazzarato and
the bible. Mikhail Bakhtin has a posse!
Distant Feeling(s) 7th, activated on
December 7th, 2019, was the third annual activation of the Distant
Feeling(s) project, inviting all interested to participate in a shared moment
of togetherness across a distance.
Article by Daniel Pinheiro on Distant Feeling(s), an online performance project - being together eyes closed, no talking - a sensitive connexion through machines.
It is not a proposition for a
revolution nor a resolution for an evident relational crisis, it is an
experience on connectivity and its fundamentals.
I liked encountering a very “contemporary” concept of life: The
concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a
history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is
credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be
determined by history rather than by nature…
I was also very much charmed by Benjamin’s idea of translation as a form of art concerned with what happens when one language passes
into another. a
translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must
lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of
signification, thus making both the original and the translation
recognizable as fragments of a greater language,
And that greater language was called pure language.
all suprahistorical kinship of languages rests in the intention
underlying each language as a whole - an intention, however, which no
single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by
the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure
language.
It is the task of the
translator to release in his own language that pure language which is
under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a
work in his re-creation of that work.
For the sake of pure
language he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.
(Valère Novarina - creuser une langue dans la sienne.)
This pure language has biblical connotations: “For then I will restore to the peoples a pure
language, that they all may call on the name of the LORD, to serve
Him with one accord” Zephaniah 3: 9, and is mostly understood as a language understood by all.
For me it’s an utopia, unattainable but interesting. In the project Distant Movements we reach for/play with something equally (im)possible, abstract, but stimulating called “mouvement pur” : movements devoid of intention.
Benjamin’s allmost 100 year old article still inspires also others. In her article Pure Language 2.0: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language and Translation Technology, Mathelinda Nabugodi asks herself: “If we merge Benjamin’s contention that translation is an art form with
his later argument that the history of art forms cannot be separated
from the technical standards of their time, the question arises whether
the introduction of machine translation, a radically changed technical
standard for the practice of translation, creates what is, in effect, a
new linguistic art form.”
After reading the post on “Translating Montreal” a friend asked me if I new the work of Antonio Muntadas? Yes. We refered to it in Huis Clos / No Exit - On Translation, a performance at NIMk Amsterdam on May 29th in 2010. How strange I forgot to include this piece in (e)stranger.
Antonio Muntadas ON TRANSLATION - THE INTERNET PROJECT 1996. An English sentence is sent to a Japanese station to be translated into
Japanese, and then to Germany for translation from Japanese to German. After
that, it is forwarded to Pakistan to be translated again. The process
continues in this manner through a total of twenty different sites until the
circle is closed with a translation from Russian back into English.
From the last station, the process begins again and goes on indefinitely.
“Communication systems provide the possibility of developing
a better understanding between people: in which language?” became after just one iteration of 20:
After one more iteration the content had completely changed: “Precision can become more anchored on an international level by seeking
out useful mediums that are important solely for the sake of help. The
essence of the problem depends upon the search for the correct answers
to common questions. It will only be possible after improved research.
Both sides will prosper when they guide themselves by this principle.”
In Huis Clos / No Exit - On Translation six net artists tried to communicate while using only their mothertongue. They were united in an interface that they shared from their
isolated positions, each in front of their own webcam, an image- and sound-space of expression and responsibility, a
playground, a laboratory.
With Igor Stromajer (Slovene), Ruth Catlow (English), Nicolas Frespech (French), Usula Endlicher (German), Paolo Cirio (Italian) and Annie Abrahams (Dutch).
6 very lonely people stuck in a situation we had not chosen. Strangely enough this shared awkwardness brought the others closer to me. … we developed our language – on the fly. The language of the 6 of us, as artists, net artists, language speaking, visual language “speaking” selves… It felt like touching upon and establishing an early grammar of this new – our – language… and improvising on it. Taken from the reactions on the performance.
comma of translation - post translation - non-translation - pseudo-translation - perverse translation -
transfiguration - translation without an original - transelation -
furthering - tradaption
Words to describe different translation practices that have the power to dislocate the self as it displaces language.
They come from Sherry Simon’s book “Translating Montreal” (2006), chapter 4 (p 119 - 161) “Paths of Perversity: Creative Interference”.
Montreal in the sixties, eighties of the last century consisted of two
very different, almost segregated, certainly polarised societies. Sherrie Simon shows how this divided languagescape was a fertile ground for
hybrid forms of translation.
She introduces us to Gail Scot’s translational writing and comma of translation, to Agnes Whitfield’s translation without an original, to Jacques Brault’s concept of non-translation (using foreign languages as a liberation from self), to Nicole Brossard’s pseudo-translation and to the furtherings and transelations of Erin Mouré.
Simon asks the reader to venture along detours where translation encounters the pleasure of perversion (deviant, disrespectful, and excessive), and so to discover an unsuspected capacity for playfull creativity.
And today? Is there still a need to translate yourself in another culture? Yes, of course - one can not go beyond the power of the country that is “welcoming” you.
Translation, if not limited to ensuring an efficient transfer from one language to another, can be a lens through which cultural differences can be assesed and appreciated. Translation can become a place of cultural creation that expresses
transitory and unfinished identities. That way translation opens up poetry in the relation and creates new spaces that
disturb existing geo-cultural relations and questions the power
hierarchy underneath. (Translated by me from Hybridité culturelle, Les élémentaires- Une encyclopédie vivante (1999).)
Sherry Simon est professeure titulaire au Département d'études françaises de l'Université Concordia.
Lily Robert-Foley in Femalentendue (TEXT Vol 20 No 2 Oct 2016). takes us on a trip through the universe of the third texte into the interliminal space where words are always “with”, never opposed, nor equivalent, a universe where everything always changes.
Abstract: This fictocritical experiment, self-translated between English and French, attempts a Slash fiction of Joanna Russ’s 1975 work
of feminist science fiction The Female Man (Russ 2011 [1975]).
In Russ’s book, characters travel in between possible worlds,
encountering possible versions of themselves that are created each time
an infinitesimal decision or change happens. In this work I propose
that translation opens possible worlds in language in much the same way
that decisions and changes do in-between Russ’s universes. I therefore
propose an nth world existing in-between languages that I call [xxx].
This world [xxx] is not to be found in one version of this text nor in
the other but in the space opened in-between my two translations. Keywords: fictocriticism, self-translation, feminist science fiction
The story is about translation of which Robert-Foley says that its impossibility is an opportunity rather than an impasse. There are pitfalls, thresholds, possibles, infinities that can be calculated, des choses en devenir, there is the difference
that makes a world, the thickness of the in-between. While reading and writing the one through the other she creates a diffractif experience.
Lily Robert-Foley is an author, translator and teacher. She introduced the concept of “Third Texte” or “Tiers texte”, which is a kind of extension of what Marylyn Gaddis Rose in Translation and Literary Criticism (1998) calls the interliminal: thatwhat lies between the source phrase and the target phrase.
…the in-between space between two languages is multiple and luminous, creating perhaps not other languages but other texts, far
beyond the scope of one text plus another. A text and its translation
are far more than one, or even two texts, and open into a space that
is neither empty nor neutral…
…l’entre-deux de deux langues fait beaucoup plus que 1+1, car l’espace
de négociation, de conflit, donc en gros, d’amitié entre deux
langues, n’est ni vide ni neutre…
I loved reading Femalentendue. I like the playfull sincerity of her quest to find [xxx]. It relates to my “research” in Agency Art (apparatus, intra-action, Karen Barad). So nice to feel two apparently different approaches intermingle.
L∅j drpp∅d ah mirrr pahinting n th∅ jjr. AH shrn ahbiss
wh∅r∅ th∅r∅ hahd b∅∅n nji sahnd. AH hj∅ in th∅ b∅ahch. Jiji jah∩gh∅d. This is from JIji (Omnia Vanitas Review, 2016) another book from Robert-Foley, that makes you change your brain.
we need to debiase databases to make them less sexist
As neural networks tease apart the structure of language, they are finding a hidden gender bias that nobody knew was there.
It is possible to query the vector space of a database to find word embeddings: “Paris : France :: Tokyo : x” will give you the answer x = Japan.
But
ask the database “father : doctor :: mother : x” and it will say x =
nurse. And the query “man : computer programmer :: woman : x” gives x =
homemaker.
One perspective on bias in word embeddings is that it merely reflects
bias in society, and therefore one should attempt to debias society
rather than word embeddings,” say Bolukbasi and co. “However, by
reducing the bias in today’s computer systems (or at least not
amplifying the bias), which is increasingly reliant on word embeddings,
in a small way debiased word embeddings can hopefully contribute to
reducing gender bias in society.https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602025/how-vector-space-mathematics-reveals-the-hidden-sexism-in-language/
This article is from 2016. A more recent article (2019) Lipstick on a Pig:Debiasing Methods Cover up Systematic Gender Biases in Word Embeddings But do not Remove Them by Hila Gonen and Yoav Goldberg from the Department of Computer Science, at the Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv suggest that the problem still exists.
The gender bias information is still reflected in the distances between “gender-neutralized” words in the debiased embeddings, and can be recovered from them. We present a series of experiments to support this claim, for two debiasing methods. We conclude that existing bias removaltechniques are insufficient, and should not betrusted for providing gender-neutral modeling.https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.03862.pdf
Writing in a language you are not fluent in … a great advantage? Strange (beautiful) non conventional writing can appear when people write in a language they don’t completely master. Haruki Murakami and Agota Kristof both wrote acclaimed and much-translated books in a tongue that was not their own. Murakami did this out of free will and gained style and probably also imagination. Agota was an exile and never at ease, always regretting the tongue she left behind. Even while extremely popular she wrote less and less and finally after the publication of her autobiography in 2005 she stopped altogether.
When Murakami started his writing, he disliked his Japanese prose and felt something was off. He then decided to write in English, but he was far from fluent. Now he had to use only the words at his disposal to express what he wanted, he found this a very efficient method. This is how his style and rhythm was created. He realized he didn’t need to use difficult words or styles to say what he wanted to say. Jonat Deelstra, Haruki Murakami’s Lessons on Writing and Leading a Writer’s Life. 2019. I was flabbergasted when I first learned this. It also made me very happy. What is happy? A word that is vague and lacks precision? Happy.
Agota Kristof was forced to learn French from scratch when she fled from Hongary in 1956. In her autobiography L’analphabète
(2004), she calls
French une langue ennemie, which is en train de tuer [sa]
langue maternelle. She
flees sentimental writing and keeps to a factual language.
We would write: “We eat lots
of walnuts” and not “We love walnuts” because the word “love” isn’t
a reliable word, it lacks precision and objectivity. Agota Kristof, Le grand cahier, 1986.
Je parle le français depuis plus de trente ans, je l’écris depuis vingt ans mais je ne le connais toujours pas. Je ne le parle pas sans fautes, et je ne peux l’écrire qu’avec l’aide de dictionnaires fréquemment consultés. Agota Kristof, L’analphabète
(2004).
I also speak French (and English) for more than 30 years and I also write in those languages for about 20 years. I am aware I will never be in complete control, will always make errors and will continue to need dictionaries. However, being able to read languagesthe one through the other is very interesting and often surprising. And, I do know I would never have had the same pleasure in writing as I have now. (I love Kristof’s books!)
The concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization or estrangement was first used by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917. In “Art as Technique” he argued for the need to turn something that has become over-familiar, like a cliché in the literary canon, into something revitalized:
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are
perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make
objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the
difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is
an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. — Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”, 12 1917 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shklovsky
Inke Arns, curator and artist director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein, used the word estrangement in an interview where she talks about the background of exhibition “Alien Matter”, that she curated. “Alien matter” refers to man-made, and at the same time, radically different, potentially intelligent matter.
IA: … I think narrative – or: storytelling
– and speculative imaginations are powerful tools of art. They allow us
to see the world from a different perspective. One that is not
necessarily ours, or that is maybe improbable or unthinkable today. The
Russian Formalists called this (literary) procedure ‘estrangement’ (this
was ten years before Bertolt Brecht with his ‘estrangement effect’).
Storytelling and/or speculative imaginations help us grasping things
that might be difficult to access from our or from today’s perspective.
It’s like an interface into the unknown. Maybe you can compare it to
learning a foreign language – it greatly helps you to understand your
own native language.
In 2015 Eric Zepka in the article Science Fiction Realismpublished by Furtherfield wrote on sci-fi images and their “meaning”. He sees them as a kind of folk language for common experience within a
technoscientifically oriented world. Reading it made me feel sad.
Is it about fleeing reality - escaping responsability - creating a dream, a nightmare … is this us? Give me Ursula Le Guin’s words.
With visual language, very quickly we get to a stranger and more
indeterminate range of science fiction possibilities than narrative
tends to map out for us……..If our environments advance exponentially quicker than any generational
or traditional mythology, what sort of language can we have for
expression?
A world not of local cultures, but of computational production. Here
anyone can know anything, it doesn’t matter where you’re from.
The real is replaced by the potential.
Image : Giselle Zatonyl
What is the language to talk about the world? If we turn to artists’
visualizations, what does that tell us about languages we speak, and
ones we read? What does the graphing of incomprehensible mechanisms tell
us in turn about art and its history? The machine’s narratives tend to
drown out any functional reality. Genre storytelling tropes become
repurposed as collective cultural ideas.
In the realm of speculation, anything is possible, and nothing is fully acceptable.
Is this about fleeing reality - escaping responsability - creating a dream, a nightmare … is this us? We are the aliens.
But maybe I should try to see and read this in the frame of ostranenie or defamiliarization or estrangement as first used by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917; it refreshes human perception and revitalizes the experience of being alive?
English is not an international language and it is wrong that scolars use it as if it is.
Describing diversity is impossible if you use English, you need a metalanguage.
Depression is an English concept. NSM makes it possible to talk about it.
Anna Wierzbicka cited from :
In this video she explains, she has nothing against people being naturally imprisonned in their language, but that she opposes scolars’ and for instance also politicians’ thoughtless use of it. I read Anna Wierzbicka’s book Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language,
because I can imagine that this indeed might be a problem.
Moreover the blurp for the book promised Anna Wierzbicka had a solution.
NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) has 65 primes (a human conceptual vocabulary) and a simple syntax.
Minimal English is a new derivative of the Natural semantic metalanguage research, with the first major publication in 2018.
It is a reduced form of English designed for non-specialists to use
when requiring clarity of expression or easily translatable materials.
Minimal English uses an expanded set of vocabulary to the semantic
primes. It includes the proposed universal and near-universal molecules,
as well as non-universal words which can assist in clarity.
Minimal English differs from other simple Englishes (such as Basic English) as it has been specifically designed for maximal cross-translatability.
From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage
There are two kinds of English words. Words of one kind are like this: if someone says something with these English words, many people in many places on Earth can know well what this someone wants to say. There are not many words of this kind. When someone says something with English words of this kind, this someone is saying it in “Minimal English”.
When someone says something in Minimal English, people in many places on Earth can know well what this someone wants to say. At the same time, people in these places can say the same thing with other words, not English words. From “Global English, Minimal English: Towards better intercultural communication” Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka 2014 : https://hrc.cass.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/hrc/u78/Global_English_Minimal_English%20position%20papers.pdf
Ps “Minimal English has no priviledged status as a conceptual mini language of human understanding. From a conceptual point of view, Minimal Spanish, Minimal Chinese, or Minimal Arabic would of course do just as well.”
Ian Giles, On the Way to Language 5 people, each speaking a different language and not using translation, talk about issues around understanding and being understood when not using your mothertongue. Akward and familiar at the same time.
Used are French, English,
Mandarin, Italian and Portuguese.
Kafka does not opt for a reterritorialization through the Czech
language. Nor toward a hypercultural usage of German with all sorts of
oneiric or symbolic or mythic flights (even Hebrew-ifying ones), as was
the case with the Prague School. Nor towards an oral, popular Yiddish.
Instead, using the path that Yiddish opens up to him, he takes it in
such a way as to convert it into a unique and solitary form of writing.
Since Prague German is deterritorialized to several degrees, he will
always take it farther, to a greater degree of intensity, but in the
direction of a new sobriety, a new and unexpected modification, a
pitiless rectification, a straightening of the head. Schizo politeness, a
drunkenness caused by water. He will make the German language take
flight on a line of escape. He will feed himself on abstinence; he will
tear out of Prague German all the qualities of underdevelopment that it
has tried to hide; he will make it cry with an extremely sober and
rigorous cry. He will pull from it the barking of the dog, the cough of
the ape, and the bustling of the beetle. He will turn syntax into a cry
that will embrace the rigid syntax of his dried-up German. He will push
it toward a deterritorialization that will no longer be saved by culture
or by myth, that will be an absolute deterritorialization, even if it
is slow, sticky, coagulated. To bring language slowly and progressively
to the desert. To use syntax in order to cry, to give a syntax to the
cry. (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 23)
How many people today live in a language that is not
their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly
the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem
of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of
minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for
all of us[…]. (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 19)
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Here is Yahya Hassan a Palestinian Danish poet that I am troubled by, but whose language, it’s anger and fragility I like. You need to do your own research if you want to know mora about him.
Nossos Lingagens. You have to accept (a FEW times). A few times. New language. Ours Lingages Trailer - Performance by Annie Abrahams in collaboration with
Daniel Pinheiro, Isabel Costa, Igor Stromajer, Outranspo - Lily
Robert-Foley - Camille Bloomfield - Jonathan Baillehache, Jan de Weille,
Rui Torres, Helen Varley Jamieson, Anna Tolkacheva and the
readingclub.fr. 21/07 2017 10.15 PM, Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória, Porto, Electronic Literature Organisation conference ELO 2017.
In this performance we used among others text from this website and the e-stranger research. More information on this performance.
Ours Lingages. The internet is my language mother. I speak
with a voice that’s not my own, I speak in other voices, not my voice.
We are all e-strangers, all nomads that use globish bastard languages.
We are the alienated translated (wo)men in-between code and emotion,
in-between our wish to be visible and our longing for intimacy.
L’entre-deux = void. Can’t we be “with” instead?
Translation is a joy as long as you can accept the imperfections of the
result, are willing to learn, to spend time, to pay attention, to take
risks and to accept your own incompleteness and glitches. Translation is
always failing, faulty, it’s a source for confusion … and discovery. It
opens a third language; another in-between, and then a fourth and …
Better take nothing for granted and play with it. Be the one not looking
at what something is, but at what something can do. You have to accept (a FEW times). A few times. New language. Let’s try to be “with”.
“My practice was always based on the difficulty of having to live in a world where I don’t understand anything.” - Annie Abrahams
The wonderfully strange Apparatus_is {Other-s}, performed online on November 1st, was part of both The Wrong biennale and the Reading Club, an ongoing series by Abrahams and Emmanuel Guez. It began as a code poem, written by Abrahams specifically for the event, and evolved over 20 minutes, as a group of invited “readers” introduced their own changes live for an online audience. These readers included
computational poet / author Nick Montfort,
artist / coder Renee Carmichael, Emmanuel Guez (co-creator of Reading Club), and “nanoloop musician and javascript nerd” Zombectro (co-creator of surreal
o/s Windows93). Their edits were differentiated by color, but it was not announced which color corresponded to which reader, leaving the freedom of psuedo-anonymity in the public performance.
Meanwhile, online bystanders carried a parallel discussion in a live chat window, which became a second kind of performance, reacting to and augmenting the main discussion. Where the main text’s pseudo-code was primarily C++-like, with passages in markup and scripting languages, the comment window accumulated its own mishmash of natural languages, with overlapping conversations in English, French, Dutch, and less familiar (to me) languages. These contributions reacted to the edits as they occurred and became a parallel text, which
Abrahams and Guez
describe as “an
interpretive arena in which, by an intertextual game, each reader
plays and foils the writing of the others.”
While previous performances worked with natural language,
the code poem by Abrahams brought with it the nullified performativity
of the code itself. It was filled with references to the body and to exchanges with other human beings and the machine, emphasizing the gestures that fail to completely traverse those divides. The liveliest discussions emerged in
parallel between the text and the chat-window commentary. Gender turned into a particularly rich
area for exploration:
From the chat window, as the gender variable is altered:
Alan
#include <name.diffraction>
bjørn
struct gender; helen construct gender helen
void it out Alan
Allan is not a proper name. Cyril
gender is power !
helen
(a)void gender
The mechanism for Reading Club events is the
open-source Etherpad, altered by
Clément Charmet to turn the collective brainstorming tool into a performance space. He added controls to set a duration, the speed of playback, and other adjustments to make it re-playable as a “cinematographic archive,“
with progressive edits playing like
frames of film, capturing the sense of the performance unfolding.
The Reading Club interface, as Abrahams sets up a new event
Previous Reading Club performances included texts by William S Burroughs and Raymond Queneau. Reading Club also featured an excerpt from the ARPANET Dialogues, a collection of fictitious online discussions, presented as if they had really happened on the pre-internet between such figures as Ronald Reagan and Jim Henson: too-perfect relics from an alternate past that are just awkward enough to be believable. A personal favorite is a discussion among pivotal art critic Rosalind Krauss and artists Yoko Ono and Joseph Beuys among others, on the emergence of Postmodernism. The group of readers for that performance – Alessandro Ludovico, editor of Neural magazine with artists Jennifer Chan, Lanfranco Aceti, and Ruth Catlow – transformed the dialogue by swapping the much-maligned pseudo-movement of Postinternet for Postmodernism, creating Postinternet is net.art’s undefined bastard child. The result contained extratextual elements that escape any momentary capture of the dialogue, such as the rhythmic
bolding and unbolding of Rosalind Krauss’s “Hello” at the top of the
dialogue, visible to those watching the event in real time or replay over time.
NOT HM :I find all this soulless. I cannot hear you. The buttons are too small. NOT RK : Then this may interest you Henry. There is tendency towards machinerism in net.art today of which you are all aware Im sure. I wonder do you feel there is a place for digitalism in the art of today. NOT JD : Dear Henry give it some time. Youll find it refreshing hopefully in a while. NOT JB : It is alienatating isn’t it. No window(s) in this room either. The window(s) are in the back of the screen and we are staring at the wall. NOT HM : I find this a strange question. That is what net.art is and always has been. NOT JD : An expression you mean of human meanness. NOT HM : Indeed. What else. What does it mean?! NOT RK : Expression is not necessarily the same as expressionism though or impressionism and impressionabilism. Im placing it in a net.art historical and cultural context - which perhaps is already obsolete.
Reading Club builds on Abraham’s career in testing the power and limitation of online interaction and collaboration, but
Apparatus_is {Other-s} in particular draws from the experience as living between languages. Abraham’s 2014 book From estranger to e-stranger reflects on this idea of the linguistic outsider:
When 12 years old, I went to high school for the first time, I noticed I didn’t speak the same way as the other pupils. I went mute for three days before trying to communicate again. In 1986 I moved from the Netherlands to France and once again I was a ‘stranger’. I was the one who had to learn a new language, who had an accent, who was difficult to understand, the one the others had difficulties paying attention to because she spoke slowly and had bad grammar. I was the ‘broken’ one. But I also was the outsider, the one with distance, the one who didn’t know the rules, and so wasn’t obliged to follow them, the one who could also be free.
In the code-poetry of Apparatus_is {Other-s}, this linguistic otherness plays out at the boundaries of human and machinic language, making it of special interest to esolangers, who similarly draw on the community-based practice in their design and exploring of code shaped by unusual constraints.
A performance, 21/07 2017 10.15 PM, Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória, Porto,
during the Electronic Literature Organisation conference : ELO 2017
Ours Lingages. The internet is
my language mother. I speak with a voice that’s not my own, I speak in
other voices, not my voice. We are all e-strangers, all nomads that use
globish bastard languages. We are the alienated translated (wo)men
in-between code and emotion, in-between our wish to be visible and our
longing for intimacy. L’entre-deux = void. Can’t we be “with” instead?
Translation is a joy as long as you can accept the imperfections of the
result, are willing to learn, to spend time, to pay attention, to take
risks and to accept your own incompleteness and glitches. Translation is
always failing, faulty, it’s a source for confusion … and discovery. It
opens a third language; another in-between, and then a fourth and …
Better take nothing for granted and play with it. Be the one not looking
at what something is, but at what something can do. You have to accept (a FEW times). A few times. New language. Let’s try to be “with”.
Performance in collaboration with Daniel Pinheiro, Isabel Costa, Igor Stromajer,Outranspo (Lily Robert-Foley, Camille Bloomfield, Jonathan Baillehache), Jan de Weille, Helen Varley Jamieson and Rui Torres.
You are welcome online for the associated session of the readingclub, where Helen is expecting you. Duration 30 min.
Ours Lingages = a script - online poetry, language learning tools and collective
writing + code + voice + dance + text + singing and a blindfold -
unrehearsed.
Excerpt from Episode 1 of Lingthusiasm: Speaking a single language won’t bring about world peace.
“Gretchen: On the International Space Station, you have
astronauts from the US and from other English speaking countries and you
have cosmonauts from Russia. And obviously it’s very important to get
your communication right if you’re on a tiny metal box circling the
Earth or going somewhere. You don’t want to have a miscommunication
there because you could end up floating in space in the wrong way. And
so one of the things that they do on the ISS – so first of all every
astronaut and cosmonaut needs to be bilingual in English and Russian
because those are the languages of space.
Lauren: Yep. Wait, the
language of space are English and Russian? I’m sorry, I just said ‘yep’
and I didn’t really think about it, so that’s a fact is it?
Gretchen:
I mean, pretty much, yeah, if you go on astronaut training recruitment
forums, which I have gone on to research this episode…
Lauren: You’re got to have a backup job, Gretchen.
Gretchen:
I don’t think I’m going to become an astronaut, but I would like to do
astronaut linguistics. And one of the things these forums say, is, you
need to know stuff about math and engineering and, like, how to fly
planes and so on. But they also say, you either have to arrive knowing
English and Russian or they put you through an intensive language
training course.
But then when they’re up in space, one of the
things that they do is have the English native speakers speak Russian
and the Russian speakers speak English. Because the idea is, if you
speak your native language, maybe you’re speaking too fast or maybe
you’re not sure if the other person’s really understanding you. Whereas
if you both speak the language you’re not as fluent in, then you arrive
at a level where where people can be sure that the other person’s
understanding. And by now, there’s kind of this hybrid English-Russian
language that’s developed. Not a full-fledged language but kind of a-
Lauren: Space Creole!
Gretchen:
Yeah, a Space Pidgin that the astronauts use to speak with each other! I
don’t know if anyone’s written a grammar of it, but I really want to
see a grammar of Space Pidgin.”
In this frame Rob Mijers brought Nadsat to my attention. Nadsat is a fictional register or argot; a Russian-influenced English in this case, used by the teenagers in Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. The name itself comes from the Russian suffix equivalent of “-teen” as in “thirteen” (-надцать, -nad·tsat’). Nadsat was also used in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the book. Thanks Rob.
Algolit
is a workgroup with an interest in i-literature, in how code and literature, code and text make sense together, or not - what, how? Algolit has regular meetings in Brussels. Sometimes I wish I lived in Belgium, so I could assist. Here is a list of some of their activities :
I like the project Death of the Authors, where Algolit uses works of authors whose works entered the public domain the year of the performance. The chatbot operaThe Death of the Authors, 1943 edition, featuring Fats Waller,
Nikola Tesla,
Beatrix Potter and
Sergei Rachmaninov is delicious.
This is the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. It is
part of a BBC radio broadcast from April 29th, 1937. The talk was called
“Craftsmanship” and was part of a series entitled “Words Fail Me”. *
In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a new language…
It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things.
In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or
confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.
And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die.
In a reaction to my post on Agency Art, Ienke Kastelein asked me how to translate the concept in Dutch. Not easy and the citations I choose from the Woolf interview translate this difficulty. Agency Art = agentieve kunst = art agentif ??? Niet erg bevredigend - pas très satisfaisant. Maybe I should look at Judith Butler translations?
By deciphering the text’s body, you become its marrow
This image shows an interpratation of the word marrow in Bliss-characters of a poem in English. Samantha Gorman used Bliss in her project Lingua Ignota (2009 -?). In the project a poem was converted back and forth between English and
blissymbolics over three rounds of translation and negotiating consensus by diverse participants.
In this proces,as I understood it, mostly done via an online apparatus I approach you in the metonymy of another language.(line 6 of the poem) became I travel toward you escaping the homeland of my story.
and By deciphering the text’s body, you become its marrow.(line 12 of the poem) became By cutting the book, you break into its spine.
Gorman’s work reads as a delicious game of translation and poetry, but for me it does more. These days I am interested in what is called Agency Art(coined by Arjen Mulder in the article The Beauty of Agency Art from 2012.I like this concept very much - it doesn’t take any technology or medium
as it’s starting point, but puts what these make possible in the
foreground. Following my interest I also read things about Bruno Latour who uses the term social agency in ANT (Actor-network theory).
Gorman’s piece echos in me what is called the proces of “translation” in
ANT. She says on het website: “Lingua Ignota is about a collaboratively authored
transference of lexical meaning between language systems.“ Isn’t that also what “agents” in Latour’s theory do?
DeafBlind Americans developed a language that doesn’t involve sight or sound
“Despite all its intricacies, Serna says protactile ASL isn’t any
harder to learn than other languages. “It’s the same concept as learning
any other language,” he says. “It’s just connecting with the group of
people whose language you want to learn.”
In this case, the connection is physical. There’s something
strikingly powerful about the language that comes from its required
intimacy.“
“Un jour, à la suite d’une remontrance par un
professeur, elle fond en larmes. Un événement qui la fit réfléchir sur
sa condition d’étudiante à l’étranger mais aussi sur son travail. Le
résultat de ce remue-méninges, c’est cet incroyable pistolet à larmes.
Une arme aux allures steampunk qui récupère vos pleurs via un étonnant
entonnoir en silicone qui se porte comme une demi-lunette, stock le
tout, gèle les larmes, puis vous permet, grâce à un système d’air
comprimé, de tirer vos pleurs congelés sur le monde et son absurdité.” https://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/fr/blog/yi-fei-chen-a-invente-un-flingue-qui-tir-ses-propres-larmes
“Zo gaat dat in Taiwan, zegt ze. Met docenten verschil je niet van
mening. En ruwheid is iets dat te allen tijde dient te worden vermeden.
Haar masteropleiding in Eindhoven betekende een cultuurshock. Opeens
eisten docenten een kritische houding, moest ze hun gezag ter discussie
stellen. Bij een presentatie barstte ze in huilen uit. „Jullie
communiceren zo direct”, zegt ze. Haar onvermogen om zich uit te spreken
heeft Chen verbeeld met haar Tear Gun, een pistool waarmee ze haar tranen kan terugschieten.” https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/10/21/wereldwerk-4920456-a1527551
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