Re: [-empyre-] Forward from Mariam Ghani: translation + minding the gaps

["ricardo miranda zuniga" <ricardo@ambriente.com>]

Hello Everyone,
I'd like to make a delayed response to Mariam's question.

Mariam, the points that you make are certainly true and I agree that
would it would be naive to consider the Internet today as the Utopian
technology that many considered it be in the mid-90s.  However, the
Internet has become the best communication technology available - to
those who have access and accessibility is growing and will continue to
do so.  As much as I agree with your points, I am at a loss as to what
it is that you are proposing - to investigate the net itself?  

Hopefully, I'm understanding your proposal and will present my thoughts
in an attempt to liven up the discussion.

I think that the point that programming languages are largely English
based and that every web developer/designer/programmer must learn some
amount of English is an interesting point that is generally overlooked
(as you point out).  As many of us are familiar with the history of the
Internet, it is a product of the U.S. war machine, hence the language of
sgml to html.  This reality is nothing new...  The United States quickly
emerged as the dominant nation in production, technology and wealth
immediately following the second World War.  As in the past, the
influence of a dominant country in modernity spreads quickly.  I think
that it may be interesting to draw parallels between the spread of
Western European languages through the colonial age to the spread of
English based programming languages through the information age.

Hopefully the dominance of English in computer culture will be curved by
the adoption of Unicode which "provides the capacity to encode all of
the characters used for the written languages of the world."
http://www.unicode.org/

I don't know much about Unicode, but to my understanding it is being
supported by the most popular operating systems, databases, printing
software, programming languages, search engines... which will eventually
lead people surfing the web in their own language and to programmers
working with their own language.

Now as to online communities...  I think that many people would agree
that the Internet in many ways has come to mirror the world at large. 
Online communities form due to similar interests, one chooses to engage
or not with a given community and if doing so will behave according to
the rules of the group.  Although the community may be composed of a
distant and international set of individuals, common interests and a
common language tend to define a group.  I'm being very general here,
because otherwise we'd have to look at particular online communities to
pick them apart.

To me the most important point that you make is capital - the means to
get online, buy space on a server, the time to create web pages and it
is due to this basic necessity money and communication infrastructure
that translation and the importance of thoughtful translators are so
important.  As accessibility grows and transnational corporations
scramble to reach or create new markets is there an ethics of
translation that is being established?

And is this a space where net savvy cultural producers can intervene
upon to question the dominance of these companies.  For example, if one
looks around for popular Spanish online discussion groups, the most
popular belong to corporations such as Univision, Telemundo - television
and magazine conglomerates.  This may not be unlike the English language
web, but the selection of smaller, independent online communities is
much smaller.
ricardo 

> Sorry, Mariam and all, for some reason best known to the software  
> this bounced.  I am forwarding on to  you.
> 
> Christina
> 
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> > From: mailman-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > Date: September 21, 2005 7:38:14 PM PDT
> > To: empyre-owner@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > Subject: Content filtered message notification
> >
> >
> > The attached message matched the empyre mailing list's content
> > filtering rules and was prevented from being forwarded on to the list
> > membership.  You are receiving the only remaining copy of the
> > discarded message.
> >
> >
> > From: Mariam Ghani <mariam@kabul-reconstructions.net>
> > Date: September 21, 2005 6:06:44 PM PDT
> > To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> > Subject: [-empyre-] translation and minding the gaps
> >
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Your delinquent co-guest-moderator here.  Have just spent the day  
> > catching up on the discussion after spending most of the month,  
> > rather aptly, translating an online project (http:// 
> > www.turbulence.org/works/seethedisappeared - caveat, it needs some  
> > updating) into a physical archive installed within blocks of Ground  
> > Zero for the anniversary of 9/11.  Over the past few years, I've  
> > been very much engaged with the question of how / whether / why to  
> > translate online the place / site / community-responsive practice  
> > that I've built up in work like the Disappeared, Kabul (http:// 
> > www.kabul-reconstructions.net, http://www.kabul-reconstructions.net/ 
> > constitutions/map.htm), Transit (http://www.kabul- 
> > reconstructions.net/transit) and Detroit/Dearborn (see the current  
> > issue of http://artwurl.org) projects.  That question is  
> > complicated by the fact that the places, communities and histories  
> > I'm interested in are almost all borderlands, liminal,  
> > transitional, contested, and narrated themselves in translation and  
> > counterpoint.
> >
> > To jump into the thread on translation, then, I'd like to start by  
> > responding to some points raised by Danny and Ian and then pose a  
> > few questions of my own.  I'm referring to two big chunks of your  
> > posts which I've copied below and will now paraphrase briefly  
> > (correct me if I get it all wrong, please!).
> >
> > Danny, you brought up the "specific gaps and untranslatables"  
> > around projects like the inSite net commissions, and characterized  
> > those gaps as being both a subject that the net.art community is  
> > unwilling to discuss and also, potentially, as posing the aesthetic  
> > and political questions at the heart of contemporary art.  Ian  
> > expanded on this by connecting your gaps to the borders of class  
> > and cultural distinction where art operates.
> >
> > I find both of these posts, and the entire thread that preceded  
> > them, really interesting because I'm nodding along with much of  
> > what's been said, and I feel that we're edging up to the heart of  
> > the discussion, but I think we're not quite there yet because we  
> > haven't examined some of our basic assumptions.  The most basic of  
> > which is this puzzlingly persistent notion that the net itself is a  
> > borderless state, a kind of endless public domain, open to  
> > intervention from anyone, anytime, any place.  I think it's  
> > important to think through the ways in which this utopian ideal is  
> > in fact less than true: the net is amorphous but it's not  
> > limitless.  Forgive me if all of this is extremely obvious.
> >
> > First: how many web programming languages exist that are not based  
> > in the English language?  Almost every web page out there, no  
> > matter what its surface linguistics (or how dynamic they may be in  
> > the service of hyperconsumerism), has an understructure with some  
> > percentage of English through which it must pass before entering  
> > machine translation and passing its packets to the network.  Its  
> > programmer has had to learn some percentage of English in order to  
> > master the technical skills to communicate through the network.   
> > It's no accident that in Lebanon, for example, a once rabidly  
> > Francophile and Francophone country has become almost totally  
> > Anglophone (and bi- instead of tri-lingual) in one generation - the  
> > IM generation.
> >
> > Second, as we all probably know from our own experiences, as online  
> > communities grow and build up histories, they develop their own  
> > border policies and politics of exclusion.  It's not just the  
> > governmental and corporate web that's under watch, but also each  
> > little group building fences and policing itself.
> >
> > Third, cash limits access to domains, domain names, server space,  
> > and so on for web producers, just as it limits access to computers,  
> > training, high-speed service, good cable and phone lines, and so on  
> > for web consumers.  People without economic resources can  
> > contribute to communities or collective projects like wikis or  
> > folksonomies, but may not be able to work as individuals.
> >
> > I bring all this up not to be depressing and cynical, but to  
> > suggest that perhaps the most productive way to bring the idea of  
> > site-specific or community-based practice online is to engage with  
> > the places, communities and histories of the net itself - or to  
> > make a deliberate effort to discover the gaps in the network - the  
> > sites of absence, where voices are missing or elided, or the online  
> > border zones, places of transition, translation and in-between,  
> > parallel to sites like San Diego/Tijuana - and use those spaces to  
> > launch mediations between on and offline practice.
> >
> > What do you think?
> >
> > Mariam
> >
> >
> >
> > The net.art community (in particular compared to a more general  
> > contemporary art scene), through various accidents of history and  
> > communities of practices, seems to have strong links with classic  
> > European political economic analysis (for better and worse), and is  
> > much more happy talking about globalisation, class, and capital in  
> > very general terms rather than the specific gaps and  
> > untranslatables around projects like those at inSite (that usually  
> > get shoehorned into questions about ethnicity or identitarianism).
> >
> >  From an art perspective, what seems important about the projects  
> > Ricardo discusses is that they seem to signal  experience-centred  
> > rather than system-centred claims to truth and aesthetic value.  
> > These seem to fit within the idea of "countercultures of modernity"  
> > that Gilroy emphasised in The Black Atlantic.  Paradoxically (for  
> > me anyway), the political-aesthetic histories in these  
> > countercultures (I think Chela Sandoval's grouping of the work of  
> > anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist movements as "methodologies  
> > of the oppressed" seems useful)  seem to open up valuable ways of  
> > reading the class dynamic within captialist new media art, i.e.in   
> > Ricardo's question "Is it possible for new media artists to  
> > activate the net for the staging of projects responsible and  
> > responsive to communities that fall between legitimized power  
> > sectors, and if so how?"
> >
> >  It strikes me that the lineage of the inSite projects is about  
> > manifesting this rupture and these alternative, experiential  
> > periodisations - producing this difference rather than seeking to  
> > resolve it. It feels to me that they treat the communities of  
> > bourgeois aesthetic practice and those outside legitimised power  
> > sectors as quite radically separate experientially, yet linked  
> > through various capital/media/aesthetic flows. So it is not  
> > supposing that the typically bourgeois new media curator can  
> > necessarily have a conversation with the typically working-class  
> > modified car enthusiast, but that by bringing the very different  
> > consciousnesses together the outline of the gaps between them can  
> > be traced, and the aesthetic question in this kind of "gap" is  
> > also, somehow, what contemporary art is all about.
> >
> >
> >> My feeling is that Danny hit a spot with this comment
> >> around gaps, inviting the coterie of gap morphology:
> >> separated, inbetween, overlapping, connected,
> >> disconnected and ruptured places, that induce
> >> heterogenic, multiplicitous, stable and dynamic
> >> consequences.
> >>
> >> One location of contemporary art is exactly this
> >> border. And it is paradoxical that net art can mediate
> >> this space, particularly where class distinction can
> >> be made more complex by cross cultural interaction.
> >> The dissasemblage of social hierarchies, while at the
> >> same time utilising a technological hierarchy, is one
> >> thing the net can do.
> >>
> >
> >
> >>   I suppose for
> >>
> > me that once the facade of culture is stripped by
> > hybridity, heterogeneity and multiplicity overtake,
> > lines of cultural referencing are distorted (or able
> > to be connected, disconnected and reconnected) and an
> > enormous diversity in approach is authorised -
> > judgement seems out of place.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > http://www.kabul-reconstructions.net/mariam
> >
> >
> >
> 
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> 

ricardo miranda zuñiga
www.ambriente.com