languages

Adventures with inter-linguistic combinatorial poetry, machine translation and text-to-speech.

An (e)stranger is invisible, exotic, unidentifiable, rude, hybrid, 
blurry, deformed, subversive, incomprehensible, complex, pliable, lonely, abject, harder and more fragile at the same time … they are more resilient, more inventive, know how to protect themselves, are good observers, look around a lot, see and ask questions about things that seem to be selfevident …

“There is so much to enjoy in this book. It is all-at-once instruction manual, poetry and a series of vignettes of contemporary encounters in language-less places.” Ruth Catlow 23-09-2014

This idea came from an university project (2017) and thanks to the exchange students' program. 

This is an experiment of digital poetry written in 14 verses: it was asked to 10 people from 10 different countries to translate each of them from English to their mother tongue.

Every clips were recorded in different places in Bergen (NO).

The result is a multilingual digital poem about Bergen.

2×6 consists of short “stanzories”—stanzas that are also stories, each one relating an encounter between two people. Appearing in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Polish, the stanzories are generated by a similar underlying process, even as they do not correspond to one another the way a translation typically does to a source text. These sixfold verses are generated by six short computer programs, the code of which is also presented in full. These simple programs can endlessly churn out combinatorial lines that challenge to reader to determine to whom “she” and “he,” and “him” and “her,” refer, as well as which is the more powerful one, which the underdog. Generating 2×6 is a simple process, and readers are invited to study the programs and even modify them to make new sorts of text generators. Reading the output can be much more difficult, as the text that is produced crosses syntax with power relations and gender stereotypes, multiplying those complexities across six languages.