transmediation

Walid Raad's The Atlas Group Archive (1989-2004) is a transmedial, fictional 'archive' which supposedly encompasses donated testimonies on the war in Lebanon (1974-1991), including diary logs, photographs (some of which contain notes), and videos, archived on theatlasgroup.org. In this case, the fictionality of the archive creates an archive where no real archive exists. The entire archive is transmedially constructed, in which the layering of content in each image becomes the key feature. There is, for example, a document named "Let's be honest the weather helped" (1998) contains a series of black-and-white images of buildings with colored dots on them, which supposedly signify various types of bullet hits (see fig. 1). The dots cover the whole area of bullet impact, so this media filter makes it impossible to verify if there were indeed bullet hits, and let alone which color the bullet tips were. The transmediality of the project is thus a means in conveying the impossibility of an archive and the unrepresentability of trauma. Medial borders are crossed through layering of content, reinforcing and destabilizing the truth value of testimony. Apart from being published on the website, Raad's project has been exhibited in different galleries around the world.

The Atlas Group Archive can be seen as an instance of 'traveling memory' (Erll), a term to describe the dynamics of commemoration in the current age of globalization. Analyzing The Atlas Group Archive as an instance of traveling memory, I argue that the internal and external institutional context of the archive largely influences its ability to become a traveling memory which "has brought forth global media cultures" (Erll). I compare the effects of the different interfaces in which this work has appeared. Apart from being published on a website, Raad's project has been exhibited in art galleries around the world. Academics have often pointed to the ways in which The Atlas Group Archive plays with the blurring of fact and fiction. I take this observation to the next level by reframing it as the engagement with decontextualisation and recontextualisation. In my analysis, each context becomes an integral part of the images, a layer of content providing meaning. In the online archive, the images function as an icon of the material notebook, and the black background of the images functions as an index, signifying that the images are uncropped and therefore authentic . In the context presentation of the exhibition, however, these images function as icons and index primarily to show that absence of their referentiality. The notebook does not exist and the black background is part of the artwork. I analyze the project's narrative function's using Manovich's criteria for narrativity in databases: the distinction between 'text', 'story', and 'fabula'. Though highly transmedial and fragmented, The Atlas Group Archive accommodates to this model, as it uses multimedia (a 'text' across media borders) to narrate the Lebanese war ('story'), colored by narration of events experienced by actors ('fabula'), and together these three elements form an archival format. According to Benjamin, the opposition between information and storytelling resides in the fact that "while the [storyteller] was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is indispensable for information to sound plausible" (101). In the case of The Atlas Group Archive, we might say that these two categories are combined. The fabula is miraculous, but the contextualisation of text and story into information makes the unity plausible. The Atlas Group Archive's narrative functions by the virtue of fragmentation, which becomes an integral part of the content: it fills gaps while at the same time creating them.

(source: author's abstract)

This paper interrogates translation as a mode of creation and dissemination in one recent work of electronic literature, TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]. To do this, translation is situated within the broader context of a string of trans variables: var trans=[lation, mutation, mediation, mission]. Trans- is a prefix meaning across, beyond, through. -lation comes from the Latin, borne, as in carried, or endured. In the translation of born-digital texts from one code language to another, what precisely is borne across, beyond, or through?

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is a transmutation of Nick Montfort’s The Two, a narrative text generator written first in Python and then translated to JavaScript by Montfort in 2008. Though the nature and form of Montfort’s narrative were substantially transformed in the creation of the Python version of TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE], and then further in the translation of the transmutation into JavaScript, something of the uncanny twinning of characters at work in The Two underpinned the process. This is a result of an operation of memory. In JavaScript, var= refers to a space in memory. Though a function choose(array) might be called upon to choose(trans), only one result will be returned. The rest remain in memory, as potential translations. This computer-generated text performs the act of selection from memory. Every 80000 milliseconds a new instance, one of an infinite number of possible translations, is displayed. The text displayed is doubly a translation, performed in the first instance by the JavaScript and in the second by the browser, which translates the source code into what we see on the screen. Further, text itself is about the translation from one place to another. var place=['Canada', 'England', 'Nova Scotia', 'Cape Breton', etc.]. Were this work to be translated into French, we might see: var place=[‘Canada’, ‘France’, ‘Acadie’, ‘Quebec’, etc.].

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] performs the transmediation of texts from archival sources that have already have passed across, beyond or through the code mediums of wires, switches, signals, air, ears, hands, paper. var receiving= for example, reproduces shorthand gleaned from logs kept at the Glace Bay Marconi Station, circa 1911: ['a few scraps of a private message', 'distinguishable dots', 'heavy traffic', 'something again', 'atmospherics', 'repeated \"are you there\"', 'a weak signal', 'no answers to our inquiries', 'no signals', 'strong readable signals, sending fast', 'some static', 'lightening all around'].

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is also a transmission. One JavaScript file which sits in one directory on one server attached to a vast network of hubs, routers, switches, and submarine cables through which this one file may be accessed many times from many places by many devices. Each time this JavaScript is called, the network, the browser, and the client-side CPU conspire to respond with a new iteration. The mission of the JavaScript source code is to generate another sort of script, a dialogue to be read aloud in three voices: Call, Response, and Interference, the live performance offering yet another reading across, beyond or through this text.