TBD is a work of intensive translation that understands translation not as an activity bound to building bridges between languages, but as an immanent material act on the way to utopia. The work began with a reading of Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism and continues to persist in a cross-platform evolution searching for a utopic platform to come. As it moves, it takes on new phase-states according to the affordances of a variety of media and platforms. It begins with the codex, but has moved through digital photography, photographic manipulation, After Effects animation, Twitter, Googleslides, .gifs — and it will continue to evolve, leaping from one platform to another, binding disparate materials and platforms to its identity even as it transforms into something else, in search of perfection. Informed by an implicit poetics latent in Deleuze’s book, it is also an outgrowing line from it.
The project poster would link to a video and googleslides providing an overview of the steps taken so far. First, I read Deleuze’s Bergsonism and filled the margins with drawings, graphs, and diagrams of my reading. Then I photographed the drawings, and isolated and manipulated them in photoshop (there are about 240). This yielded an Henri-Micheaux like set of hieroglyphics — an asemic translation of Bergsonism. Then I digitized each drawing in Photoshop, creating an infrathin space between the haptics of the hand and the smooth surface of the screen. Each drawing was then animated according to its inner logic of movement using After Effects. These animations (.movs) were translated into .gifs, then placed in small gatherings of about 6 or so at a time, which were posted to twitter, and subsequently gathered into Google Slides. Each set resembles a strange living creature endlessly performing its repeated action. Together, they are like a murmuring surface of matter underway. The next step in the process is to write descriptions of each animation, thus performing an odd form of translation. A strange re-writing of Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism will emerge from this process. These animations and their paired poems, something like medieval emblems, will be gathered on a website that will allow a user to click each one and hear its story. This is where TBD ends for now, but it will continue in search of a utopic platform to come that it has yet to discover.
