French

Author description: Translation (version 5) investigates iterative procedural "movement" from one language to another. Translation developed from an earlier work, Overboard. Both pieces are examples of literal art in digital media that demonstrate an "ambient" time-based poetics. As it runs the same algorithms as Overboard, passages within translation may be in one of three states — surfacing, floating, or sinking. But they may also be in one of three language states, German, French, or English. If a passage drowns in one language it may surface in another. The main source text for translation is extracted from Walter Benjamin's early essay, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man." (Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. One-Way Street and Other Writings. 1979. London: Verso, 1997. 107-23.) Other texts from Proust may also, less frequently, surface in the original French, and one or other of the standard German and English translations of In Search of Lost Time. The generative music for translation was developed in collaboration with Giles Perring who did the composition, sound design, performance, and recording of the sung alphabets.

Le Mange-Texte is a work by Jean-Marie Dutey that perfectly represents the esthetic of frustration. There are two versions of Le Mange-Texte: the original 1989 version (that was programmed and published in alire 0.1 and alire 1) and the 1994 version. When one starts to look at the black screen, squares appear, changing into the form of four letter words. The words gradually develop and the reader tries to decipher the letters in order to make sense of the unclear words (that can be read vertically, revealing the verses of the poem). The moment one tries to read the words in their proper context, the machine “eats” the text which transforms into different shapes. The color changes from blue to pink and instead of squares, one sees flowers, and the words change. Some words repeat, but the word “rose” (which can also be translated from original French into English as “pink”) appears, for example. Once again, the machine “eats” the words and the process repeats. It is difficult to read the text because the reader must try to distinguish the letters. With the speed of the changes and the machine's control, one experiences a sense of losing control and one can become frustrated. This work mixes temporal and spatial elements in that the page becomes non-transitory for several instants to become text, but it is a transitory text because it continues to change. (Source : Amy E. Laws) Do make sense of the words that appear and disappear so quickly, the reader can read them in two ways. One can concentrate on the individual words and try to make logical connections between them. For example, we can find subject-verb pairs ("elle voit" for example) or small adjectival phrases (example: "vous êtes snob"). However, the reader can see and retain even more words if he looks at the whole screen at once. With this approach, the eye is drawn to certain words that together, tell a more complete story. By reading the poem in this way, a theme begins to emerge. One can read sentences/fragments such as “très tard hier soir” (very late last night) and “sans rien dire” (without saying anything). We also see questions like “quel type êtes vous?” (what kind are you?) and “quel ciel vous sied?” (what heaven suits you?). Through these words, the image of a seductive woman appears. This fantasy is a principle theme of the poem, as it uses suggestive and sexual vocabulary. This image is strongly linked to the aesthetic of the piece. The idea of a powerful woman that metaphorically “devours” is physically represented by the program that “eats” the text as soon as it becomes readable. (Source: Erin Stigers)

“Retournement” is a syntactic animation from 1991. It is not the movement of words on the screen that counts in the syntactic animation, but the syntax changes that movement entails. So, reading by following the words with his eyes or performing a spatial reading of the screen "product" different texts. The reading may switch at any time between these two modes. So, the number of texts contained in these some words is uncertain and it is impossible for the reader to build all while the movie is playing. This is a non-algorithmic type of generator for which the reader himself is the inference engine, and that only a space-time processing of language allows. At times of the animation, the meaning can be seen as optimistic or pessimistic depending on the method of reading; a verb can even become its own subject, making performative the sentence. All this happens in a visual time gesture that is something of a caress that an improvisation on the violin emphasizes.

Patrick Burgaud's “the Albatross” uses Charles Baudelaire 's poem as tags to surf on Youtube. He downloaded the videos "called" by Baudelaire's words and edited them, according to the verses of the piece. Each movie fragment correspond to a word or words group. Each verse of the original can be read as subtitles. The English translation was automatic, using Google. The resulting work is to be seen as a web video on YouTube.