experiment

Zapraszamy na piąte w tym roku akademickim spotkanie Koła Naukowego Literatur Eksperymentalnych UW. Porozmawiamy o "Namaluj Popka" Shiva Kotechy i polskiej wersji książki w tłumaczeniu Piotra Mareckiego. O zagadnieniu przekładu konceptualnego opowiedzą Piotr Marecki i Aleksandra Małecka. Spotkanie odbędzie się 16 kwietnia o 18:30 na Wydziale Polonistyki UW w sali 26.UWAGA! W trakcie spotkania będzie można złowić Ha!artowe gadżety. Chętnych prosimy o zabranie kredek, ołówków i innych narzędzi, którymi można namalować Popka. Wykład poświęcony zostanie zjawisku przekładu eksperymentalnego. Jako studium przypadku przekładu przedstawiona zostanie książka Namaluj Popka Shiva Kotechy (2017), w której zastosowany został przekład konceptualny. Oryginał pod tytułem Paint the Rock (2013) miał postać wpisującej się w nurt literatury ambientowowej i proceduralnej kolorowanki zachęcającej do malowania z pamięci amerykańskich celebrytów płci męskiej. Polska wersja lokalizuje ten pomysł używając postaci obecnych w rodzimej wyobraźni masowej. Autorzy opiszą kontekst oryginału, proces tłumaczenia i nowy kontekst recepcji w języku polskim, podkreślając jednocześnie rolę tłumacza jako ambasadora nowych trendów w literaturze oraz twórcze aspekty przekładu eksperymentalnego.Aleksandra Małecka – doktorantka w Katedrze do Badań nad Przekładem i Komunikacją Międzykulturową Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego. Absolwentka Instytutu Lingwistyki Stosowanej Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. Przygotowuje pracę doktorską na temat przekładu literatury z ograniczeniami (constrained writing / littérature à contraintes). Współorganizuje Festiwal Literatury Eksperymentalnej Ha!wangarda. Prowadzi zajęcia i warsztaty z przekładu literatury eksperymentalnej. Wspólnie z Piotrem Mareckim redaguje Linię Konceptualną w wydawnictwie Fundacji Korporacja Ha!art, w której ukazują się tłumaczenia literatury eksperymentalnej oraz przekłady eksperymentalne.Piotr Marecki – adiunkt w Instytucie Kultury Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego. Postdok na Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2013–14). Tłumacz literatury eksperymentalnej m.in. powieści generatywnej Zegar światowy (2014) Nicka Montforta, konceptualnego Interesu (2016) Stevena Zultanskiego i Namaluj Popka (2017) Shiva Kotechy. Wspólnie z Aleksandrą Małecką wykonali automatyczne tłumaczenie Ubu Króla Alfreda Jarry’ego za pomocą Google Translate. W ramach projektu „Twórcze programowanie” realizowanego ze środków NPRH był inicjatorem i współtwórcą UBU lab na UJ.

The poster is a visual presentation of the experiment that was the translation from English into Polish of the Nick Montfort computer generated novel World Clock (2013) and its subsequent publication and distribution in print in Poland (Zegar światowy, 2014). The poster is composed of two distinct parts. The first part is devoted to the in-depth description of the problem of translating a generator, focusing on the challenges connected with the language transfer of programmed narrative work, as well as chosen issues connected with the publication process. The second part covers what occurred after the publication of the book and presents the conclusions of the analysis of the reception of the work.Zegar światowy was the first computer generated novel published as a book in Poland, thus it gained interest of some media and critics, who usually do not discuss experimental works. It may be hypothesized that the interest was partially due to the fact that the generator was partially inspired by a text by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, which makes it an example of what Strehovec describes as derivative writing.

In the first part, using the expressive processing tools proposed by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the authors describe the translation process, beginning with the input data, the code of the process and ending with the generated output. The program, written in English, consists of 165 lines of code and randomly generates 1440 short stories, which are coordinated with the Python pytz time zones application, pairing the generated stories with cities in different timezones. Because of numerous differences between the grammar of English and Polish, the Polish version of the program consists of as many 229 lines. The translator chose to make changes in the code in order to generate from the input stories with a similar structure, but accommodating for the specifics of the Polish language. Writing the code required addressing a number of problems, like including grammatical gender or translating the names of characters and locations. Some other changes were dictated by the use of timezone definition base in Python, for which there is no Polish version. In this part of the poster the authors will also address the question why publication in the medium of a traditional print book was one of the key elements of the project, referring to literature on the materiality of literature.

The second part of the project is an analysis of the marketing and reception of the book in Poland. Montfort's project is inspired by a made-up book review by Stanisław Lem, in which the writer imagines the book One Human Minute, consisting of an enumeration what all the people around the world do in one minute. The Polish translation was marketed as a computer generated novel based on Lem's idea. Thanks to the decision to distribute this conceptual work just like conventional literature, through a traditional publishing house, the work received critical reception unprecedented for works from the field of electronic literature in Poland. Instead of being discussed by digital media scholars, Zegar światowy received 15 reviews in mainstream columns and on blogs and websites devoted to conventional literature. This experiment provided the opportunity to analyze how experimental electronic literature is perceived by actors from the field of conventional literature. The author analyzes the discourse of their reactions, the focal points of which include the “non-human” aspect of the work, its experimental character and values associated with it, as well as different approaches to the reference to the celebrated Polish science fiction writer. 

Coover wrote: “The most distinctive literary contribution of the computer has been (...) the intimate layering and fusion of imagined spatiality and temporality.” Of course, by “spatiality” Coover meant the topologies of text non-linear in its presentation, not a more literal representation of space. I discuss my experiments using the Google Maps API as an interface for hypertext fiction. This of course is not in itself new, but there are some possibilities in cartography-oriented fiction I would like to call attention to. In particular:

1. Using a familiar interface, such works may introduce a broader audience to Electronic Fiction, without dumbing it down;

2. The Golden Age’s concerns with spatiality are recast now with a third extra dimension, represented space in a more literal sense. The realm of topological possibilities in this intertwining – temporality, textual structure, represented space – is vast. 3. Such works inevitably touch upon our subjective relationship with space, and the shifting modes of our articulation thereof. Three works are presented:

1. Where in the World is Loira do Banheiro? (2008) is a collaborative map of haunted places in Sao Paulo. Visitors are invited to contribute their own stories of haunted places – personal, a-friend-of-friendish, or belonging to folk/common knowledge. An introductory text and a design in imitation of classical “ghost stories” websites suggest some playfulness to the endeavor. This work has been featured in Folha de São Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo, the two largest newspapers of the city and the first and third, respectively, in the country. Besides points 2 and 3 listed above, this work explores the common grounds between anonymous writing and folkloric storytelling.

2. Quem Matou Clarah Averbuck? (2009) Clarah Averbuck is a writer residing in Sao Paulo, who became notorious for her thinly-veiledly autobiographical fiction and who began her career writing on the Internet. In the real world, she is alive; in the story, she is found dead in mysterious circumstances. Her death itself is completely irrelevant, but the “mystery of her death” connects different storylines. I have tried to point out the specificities of the interface, such as using satellite photographs of real places in a work of fiction and its consequences, for example; and to scrutinize point 2 more closely. It is a humorous work, and its Leitmotiv is the difference between fiction and lies. Clarah Averbuck was not pleased.

3. The Time Again of Bruno Zeitblom (2010 – of yet unfinished) This work portrays a character, a musician fascinated with Sound Landscapes and the role of spatiality in music, by describing his relationship with the space he inhabits. Recordings of found and ambient sounds are presented as the main character’s attempt of an "aural cartography" of the city.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI).

As chronicled on the “Beard of Bees” website, authors involved with Gnoetry, “an on-going experiment in human/computer collaborative poetry composition”, have collectively engaged with digital textual processing for more than a decade (see http://beardofbees.com/gnoetry.html and also http://gnoetrydaily.wordpress.com/). In 2011, the group published their first anthology, Gnoetry Daily, Vol. 1, a 52 page collection of verse spun with programs named Gnoetry, charNG, Infinite Monkeys, ePoGeeS, welatanschauung, and JanusNode, with accompanying commentary by Eric Elshtain, eRoGK7, Matthew, edde addad, nathanielksmith, and DaveTolkacz.

The software program engineered by the group, Gnoetry, synthesizes language based on its analysis of existing texts, thus mimicking the “statistical properties” of its input texts; users filter language by applying constraints in each of the programs they favor. Concluding the “Methodological Notes” included in Gnoetry Daily, Vol. 1, addad writes, after highlighting capabilities of their preferred programs, “Generally, we just want to write good poetry”. Emphasizing the
contents of Gnoetry Daily, Vol. 1, we analyze successes and failures in this pursuit and discuss how the group’s practice interestingly falls in line with what could be called a “post-TRAVESTY” continuum. TRAVESTY is a text processor constructed in the 1980s by Hugh Kenner and Joseph O’Rourke that had great influence on digital poetry’s development in the United States, by inspiring subsequent important works by Jackson Mac Low, Charles O. Hartman, and others, and initiating dialog between practitioners.

Efforts of those involved with Gnoetry group not only recall the communal rapport initiated by artists who appreciated and worked with TRAVESTY, but also some of the program’s aesthetic and computational agenda as well. In addition to pursuing such topics, we will, using the conference paper as an input, create spontaneous poems that offers us, and the audience, an opportunity to evaluate the program’s qualities in real time—as a way of suggesting the key to interpreting the significance of these alliances and aesthetic directions is to imagine the authorial process as a mode of interactivity.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)