Translations

Translations is the practice-based component of my bachelor’s artistic honors thesis. Translations explores how everything around us is data that is read in a particular way; and, consequently, Translations attempts to open up different ways of reading the data around us, through translating physical objects to images, images to sound, and sound back to images.

A destroyed city, built from wood, serves as the central spectacle of this piece. Visitors are invited to look at this sculpture and take in its iconography and architectural features. As they walk around the sculpture, they might trigger an ultrasonic sensor hidden at the sculpture's pedestal. One sensor triggers the projection and sound. The other sensor triggers a different projection-mapping of the image. All images shown are different versions of a single picture of the sculpture. To create the different images, I decoded the original picture and encoded it as a .wav file, which I then digitally processed. Each audio processing procedure resulted in a different sound file, so when I re-encoded that file as a .jpeg file, a new image was produced. Thus, I created over 20 image-sound pairs, one of which is randomly triggered when a viewer is detected by the ultrasonic sensor.

The motivation behind the complicated spatial design of the environment of the piece is an attempt to capture and inscribe the choreography at the heart of the translation process. In my research, I found that the fundamental gesture of the translation act is a non-linear, back-and-forth, zig-zag. When a visitor walks around the sculpture and triggers a sensor, the visitor’s viewing experience is interrupted by the triggered projection and sound. Turning their head to observe the previously unknown feature of the installation, the visitor ceases to move linearly in the gallery: they turn back. Comparing the projection with the sculpture in front of the visitor, the visitor zig-zags again. Continuing to participate in this non-linear set design of the installation, the visitor embodies the figure of the translator who moves words and meanings from one language to another, back-and-forth. Thus, a play about the concept of translations unfolds.

Exhibited at Stanford, as part of Stanford's Honors in the Arts Final Exhibition.