Artist's Description

translation by John Cayley, with Giles Perring, 2004, refactured for the web 2019.

translation investigates iterative, procedural ‘movement’ from one language to another.

translation was developed from my earlier works of digital language art that demonstrated an ‘ambient’ time-based poetics. Passages within translation transliterate continuously and will also shift, from time to time, to be in one of three states – surfacing, floating or sinking. Moreover, they will shift, from time to time, to be in one of three languages, German, French, or English. If a passage sinks in one language it may surface or float in another.

The main supply text for translation is a short extract from Walter Benjamin's early essay, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.’ Other passages from Marcel Proust's The Way by Swann's may also, less frequently, surface in the original French, or in one or other of the published German and English translations.

The generative music for translation was developed in collaboration with Giles Perring who did the composition and sound design. The base alphabets were sung in Giles' tunings by Melanie Pappenheim, and were recorded by Giles.

Click the image below to view this piece.

Use the forward arrow key / swipe-left on mobile and back arrow key / swipe-right to move forward or go back in the piece.

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Medium: Web application

About the Artist

John Cayley is a pioneering maker and theorist of digital language art, and Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

Grammalepsy: essays on digital language art was published in 2018. <programmatology.shadoof.net> @programmatology