The Thousands

Sometimes the holiday season can leaves one’s communication skills a little burnt out, so it is interesting and timely that Baden Pailthorpe’s Lingua Franca show is one of Firstdraft’s January set of exhibitions. These new media works ”explore language, translation and misunderstanding” through a strange kind of breaking down and remixing of Nineteen Eighty-Four, using [both] the text of the George Orwell’s 1949 novel, and the film adaptation of the eponymous year.

The text of the novel has been run through every language on Google Translate, all the way back through to English again, with the Chinese-whispered results having been tweeted throughout the process and turned into a limited edition book called Eighty-Four Doors (50 copies at $100 each, contact the artist for sales). It’s full of flipped meanings, syntactical disorganisation, weird spacing and bits that read straight outta Finnegans Wake, and copies will be sitting fabric-bound and looking ready to have a library call number on its spine on the gallery wall.

They’re accompanied by a data visualisation graphic (developed in collaboration with London-based designer/data artist Stefanie Posavec) that traces  each word in the book’s first paragraph through its telos-undermining poesy, and a video display that cuts scenes from the film with extracts from the book.

Translation is a tricky and interesting thing, and when you set the ‘arbitrary and relational‘ nature of the interpretability of language up with/against the necessarily finite processing of Google’s translation algorithms a new kind of textual voice emerges. As it says in “If the head cannot assume this is not always understood announced two years ago, or the freedom to sell a certain image to keep in custody a long time, I think they are dead, because sometimes the lost, always, these entries one experiments opens up many hundreds of staff.”