Installation view, Lingua Franca, Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney (2012)
Baden Pailthorpe, Eighty-Four Doors (2012), Installation view.
Eighty-Four Doors is an experimental literary work derived from George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both the content and the title of this new book are the result of an extended process of linguistic remixing: hundreds of translations and retranslations using Google’s online statistical translation machine, Google Translate.
Eighty-Four Doors can be read from any point in the book. As a result of the extended translation process, each chapter is both unique and independent from the others. Miniature narratives burst from one line to the next before fizzling out and yielding to another. Eighty-Four Doors is an algorithmic anthology of automated one-liners.
Eighty-Four Doors gives the strange poetry of Google’s algorithms a voice. Yet it also signals the complexity and subtlety of language, and the limits of the translation machines that attempt to code, control and standardise them. The political power of language—and in particular translation—is something that Orwell himself strongly referred to in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet rather than opposing Google’s attempt at a global language, Eighty-Four Doors embodies both the limits of this effort, and the awkward beauty of the misunderstandings and mistakes that it produces.
Baden Pailthorpe & Stefanie Posavec, τόπος Topos (2012). Giclée print on archival paper, 200 cm x 100 cm.
This graphic is a visualisation of the first paragraph of Orwell’s 1984 as it is translated through every language on Google Translate. Each line represents a single word: the first word in the paragraph is on the left and the last word is on the right. These 'word lines' travel down the graphic through each language on Google Translate alphabetically, starting and ending with English. Each translation is returned to English before proceeding to the next language. The colour changes denote words that have been changed by Google between translations, and the lines become thinner as a word survives through more and more translations.
At the bottom of the graphic the remaining 'word lines' represent what the first paragraph of 1984 looks like after being translated through all languages on Google Translate. Only five words survived from the original text. By translating each outcome of the Google Translate process back into English, one is able to see how the translation process twists the order of the words in the paragraph (where the lines tangle up) and where new words are added (where new lines/colours begin). Finally, the red lines represent where 'linguistic detritus' (jumbled, random & nonsense words) appear and are dragged through the translation process.
Lingua Franca is a video installation based on Michael Radford’s cinematic translation of 1984. In this work, Baden Pailthorpe has removed the dialogue in scenes depicting the two main relationships of the protagonist Winston: his lover Julia and his torturer O’brien. These characters are left stranded on the threshold of verbal communication. The language that has been removed from these scenes is replaced by excerpts of Pailthorpe’s translated version of 1984, Eighty-Four Doors. Just as Google Translate reveals hidden content from within 1984, this video work releases a hidden visual sub-language from the filmic adaptation of 1984 and returns it to paper.
Installation view, Formation (difference & repetition) II, Prosume This, BEKO, Berlin, Germany, 2011.
Installation view, Formation (battle), PixelPops!, Galerie Nouvel Organon, Paris, France, 2011.
Installation view, Formation (difference & repetition) I, Poles Apart, Blindside, Melbourne, Australia, 2011
Wednesday 14th September 2011 from 6pm
Installation view, Rockets (after Roman Signer), Monobandes II, Les Territoires, Montréal, Canada, 2010.
Installation view, Twist, Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, Australia, 2010.
Installation view, Other v2.0, Inflight ARI, Hobart, Australia, 2010.
Thingmajig (Other v2.0), Kings ARI, Melbourne, Australia, 2009.