language

This digital artwork by Amira Hanafi was commissioned by the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, as part of the Navigating Risk, Managing Security, and Receiving Support research project.

It was made in response to research conducted in five countries (Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, and Mexico), where researchers spoke with human rights defenders around issues of security, wellbeing, and perceptions of ‘human rights defenders’ in their countries.

Reading through these transcribed and anonymized interviews, I was struck by the range and depth of emotions expressed. The speakers’ experiences resonated with me in their resemblance to the emotions I feel as a practicing artist in Egypt. This website translates my reading of these interviews into visual patterns, through a system of classifying sentences by emotions expressed and evoked.

The title of this work (we are fragmented) is taken from the words of one of the human rights defenders who participated in the research.

After reading through the interviews that were shared with me, I created a classification system to coincide with the range of emotions I read in the text. I based my classification system on a few popular classification systems. It contains a set of 6 parent emotions, each with 6 subcategories, for a total of 36 classifications.

Reading the interviews again, I recorded my emotional experience by classifying sentences to which I had an emotional reaction, or in which the speaker explicitly expressed an emotion. It was a highly subjective exercise. Ultimately, this website offers personal maps of my reading of the research material, processed through language and emotion.

Alongside my visual interpretation of the research, you can directly access the source material for each classification on this site. Click on any colored circle, and you will see the direct quote from the individual defender on which that classification is based. I hope for this work to give an alternate way of reading through the research shared with me by Juliana Mensah and Alice Nah.

(Source: http://wearefragmented.amiraha.com/about/)

The Aberration of the Translator considers virtual reality as a social space, one with its own rules of presentation and communication. Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” is sampled and celebrated to create a microcosm of colliding quotations that break and collide across the virtual space of the CAVE. Every language is a foreign language, learned through memorized rules and societal agreements. In Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” refastening shards of a shattered vessel is compared to the act of translation; writing must be fragmented and then reassembled to traverse barriers of language. The Aberration of The Translator acknowledges the world which utilizes linguistic tools to order, colonize, and develop architectural space, specifically interrogating the act of code-switching and the multilingual experience.As a personal translation of the found text, original content was written in response to Anzaldua’s essay and recorded. These short responses serve as inspiration for the sonic interventions to the physical structure of Anzaldua’s essay fragments. Meaning is shattered as languages are transported across culture and territory in an audiovisual environment. Texts overlap, audio readings interrupt each other, sentences fold in upon themselves. The project seeks to question where languages converge and break apart. Simultaneously, the environment asks: how can three-dimensional space articulate and challenge legibility? The piece makes visual a collage of the incomprehensible and the legible in order to render a place of bewilderment. What results is a new apparatus for reading across languages.

The visual poem shows in a graphical way what kind of metamorphoses take place in the text. The names can refer to different things each time because language is a mobile 'army of metaphors'.

(Source: Translation of the description in Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

The poem 'Bijenkorf' by Annet de Graaf spoke to me because it uses minimal interventions to give another meaning to words. As i interpret it, the poem is about someone who is seeking a person, but this person has changed so much that only the memory remains. I have chosen to make an animation which is a literal as well as surreal quest for words of the poem. The animation consists of a lot of articles you could find at a department store, but also a few objects that do not belong there at all. The reader/viewer uses the cursor to search for invisible buttons which lead to the next sentence. The location of the buttons is only clear because the cursor changes into a hand when the reader moves across it.

(Translation description Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

This app developed for the iOS environment is a reworking of a video work titled Unicode (2012) which “shows all displayable characters in the unicode range 0 - 65536 (49571 characters). One character per frame.” The video lasts about 33 minutes and has a sound component which he didn’t use for the app. The app adds a simple user interface which allows speeding up or slowing down the character display, shaking for random access to the characters, and an interactive function that uses the touchscreen interface and the accelerometer. This is a conceptual work which allows us to appreciate the rich palette of characters and symbols written languages from around the world offer and can be accessed when encoded in the Unicode standard.

(Source: ELC 3)