visual

The reading of any text, or the translation from one language (or mode) to another relies on a process of interpretation. Following Derrida, in his theory of translation, Lawrence Venuti writes that ‘Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences among signifiers along a potentially endless chain (polysemous, intertextual, subject to infinite linkages), it is always differential and deferred, never present as an original unity’ (Venuti 2008: 13). These plural and contingent relations that have the capacity to produce different meanings were played out in Ana Cavic and Sally Morfill’s animation for ELO 2016 (Rules that order the reading of clouds). Lines, as signifiers, developed through gestures of drawing, reformed repeatedly to create different relations, and produce new meanings that shifted between the contexts of image and text. In the process of making Rules (2016), the active space where interpretation occurred and meaning was produced lay between the frames of animated movement. This between space, or gap - prone to perceptual failings - is at the core of a new collaboration between Cavic, Morfill and Tychonas Michailidis. I am not listening is an interactive installation in which the interpretative space between the aural, visual and haptic is exposed and activated. The audience is witness to what Roman Jakobson describes as ‘intersemiotic transposition’ (1959): verbal signs are interpreted by means of non-verbal sign systems, and vice versa. Where Jakobson stated that ‘poetry is untranslatable,’ a creative transposition provides the listener with vibrating sensory feedback that is in fact a direct translation of the text. A chain of translation processes begins with simple drawing gestures from which a ‘kit’ of lines is developed. These lines, translated into a material form (initially adhesive vinyl), are physically arranged and rearranged to construct a series of poetic texts or ‘sculpture poems’ that in turn provide the content for audio recordings of spoken word. While preparing the adhesive vinyl lines, the process of weeding (removing the unwanted shapes from the vinyl sheet) produces remnants that are rolled into spherical sculptural objects. These are reinterpreted in their final material form to incorporate vibro-haptic technology, providing an object-interface through which the audio recording can be manipulated. In this work, therefore, literature is mediated by technology. The inclusion of alternative sensory formats to support the listening/reading of a text both augments the experience of the audience, and underlines its incompleteness within a chain of signification.

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/)

Using visual QR codes embedded into combinations of traditional quilt blocks drawing on piecing and applique, the reader will discover fragments of a quilter’s story using any QR-reader capable smart phone. The primary object of installation is an original quilt, designed using high-contrast panels of fabric to allow the QR reader to decode additional meaning in what will appear to the human eye as an abstract piece steeped in traditions of pieced and quilted textile art. This installation thus combines two traditions of meaning: one analog, the language and traditions of quilt blocks, and one digital, the interconnected hypertext trails of communication unlocked through finding the QR codes. By providing a tangible interface to a re-imagined, oft-forgotten, and somewhat "broken" era of the web, the quilt tells the story of its imagined creator, a quilter working during the “early” days of the web in 1999. The narrative draws on connections made at a distance, and is told through sites that recall the aesthetics and networks of the time (primarily LiveJournal, Webrings, and Geocities) while using one of the earliest mechanisms of “augmented” reality. These fragmented elements capture the sense of embedding one’s self into crafts both digital and tactile, and leaving behind a record of one’s passing through threads whose knots can never truly be unraveled.

This is an artist's talk about "Ocotillo." It is a textual and visual work. The basic idea is to read from generated arrangements of textual strings, performing real-time versions of poetic works. These are not generator works but deliberate modifications within textual fields, a continuing stage in the evolution of this particular, and literary rooted form of practice. The objective of this creative work is to push these kinds of concentrated poetic textuality further, offering it as one possible direction in the field. (Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

SimpleTEXT is a collaborative audio/visual public performance that relies on audience participation through input from mobile devices such as phones, PDAs or laptops. SimpleTEXT focuses on dynamic input from participants as essential to the overall output. The performance creates a dialogue between participants who submit messages which control the audiovisual output of the installation. These messages are first parsed according to a code that dictates how the music is created, and then rhythmically drive a speech synthesizer and a picture synthesizer in order to create a compelling, collaborative audiovisual performance. SimpleTEXT was originally funded by a commission from Low-Fi, a new media arts organization based in the UK.

(Source: http://www.coin-operated.com/2010/05/01/simpletext-2003/)

Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (ポートピア連続殺人事件?, literally The Portopia Serial Murder Incident), is an adventure game designed by Yuji Horii and published by Enix (now Square Enix). It was first released on the NEC PC-6001 in June 1983, and later ported to other personal computers. Chunsoft ported the game to the Nintendo Famicom, known outside Japan as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, on November 29, 1985, and to different mobile phone services starting in 2001. It is the first part of the Yuuji Horii Mysteries trilogy, along with its successors Hokkaido chain murder: disappearance of Ohotsuku (Hokkaidou Rensa Satsujin: Ohotsuku ni Kiyu, 1984) and The Karuizawa Kidnapping Guide (Karuizawa Yuukai Annai, 1985). There are several fan translations to English but no official translation.