Walter Benjamin

What happens at the edges of bordercrossing technologies? Our poster showcases an exploratory, Benjaminian digital experiment that queers the investigation into who and what and how emerging technologies connect with our bodies, lives and desires. This work is part of a larger project investigating tools, platforms and digital strategies that help us to weave together the digital and the analogue, human and machine, and interactivity that moves us beyond linearity to multiplicity, and for ELO we are excited to highlighting our proposed experimental project archive, still in the early stages of development as we are considering multiple platforms and seeking feedback. We’re building a kind of queer digital arcades - both platform and method - weaving together poetry, elit, theory and ephemera to perform an interactive, technoerotic story that troubles the borders between technologies, selves, others and the world. Our goal is to offer de-centred and multiple entry points to explore the increasingly ubiquitous technologies that summon our curiosities, vulnerabilities and penetrability, and implicate our skin, our memories of the basement bar, and our bravery. This multivocal work includes both poetic and analytical texts, electronic literature and theory as we work to visually and associatively map a series of technologies and concepts into constellations and queer formations. We understand and use the term “queer” methodologically – that is, we believe that queerness is a way of doing, whether that doing is in the production, consumption, or circulation of digital forms. The queerness here is in the very structure of the interface, the affordances of the platform, the non-linear, expansive, and associative logics that are revealed through exploration. The result is aspirational as much as, or more than, it is analytic, prompting users to imagine new speculative queer worlds as we all grapple with the ones we currently inhabit. The larger project aims to literalize the circuit formed by the digital and the queer, thus representing an emerging, heterogenous interactivity that produces radical possibilities, possibilities that we call edge effects. Our Benjaminian digital arcade aims both to capture and perform some of these edge effects and will include new electronic writing alongside experiments in spatial theorymaking. We are considering a variety of platforms at this time, including: 1) VR Chat; 2) an emerging beta platform for webvr and 3) Unity. We anticipate having screen captures of prototypes across multiple platforms and perhaps active links to beta worlds to share at the time of the conference.

If we are to follow Paul de Man’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Task of the Translator” , the translating process, far from being an attempt at totalization, further fragments the already fragmented pieces of a greater vessel, "die reine Sprache", or pure language, which remains inaccessible, and stands for a source of fragmentation itself. The work exists only through the multiple versions it comprises. As claimed by Walter Benjamin in « The Task of the Translator », a work always demands a translation which is both an alteration and a guarantee of its perpetuation : "(…) it can be demonstrated that no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife -- which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living -- the original undergoes a change."
Quite similarly, the hyperlinking process on which electronic hypertext relies defies totalization as it keeps fraying a textual fabric that is bursting at the seams and begging for an endless recomposition which points to the seriality inherent in the concept of translation. Each reading is akin to a versioning of a text that remains ungraspable as a whole.The cognitive overhead any attempt at holding all the threads in one hand would most certainly cause confusion for the translator/reader.
The inaccessibility of the work as a whole etches out a ghostly body of text, a blurry halo that haunts the margins of each lexia notwithstanding the underlying layers of code. I would like to contend that the translating process may be construed as a form of archiving as it involves a necessary selection which is also a destruction of “the original” text paradoxically meant to ensure its survival as the translated fragments migrate into a new spectral body of text spliced with updated strings of code enabling its performance, or becoming-text. Reading/translating afternoon, a story is akin to being caught within an infinite feedback loop which exacerbates the iterability of any textual form in its very performance. Each attempt at translation can be interpreted as a terminating condition which interrupts the potentially infinite loop on which afternoon’s performance is based and thereby offers transient islands of stability in a sea of proliferating and monstrously hybridized possibilities, each time begging anew for a redrawing of the limits of the wor(l)d.