Group items tagged

"You know that split-second lag when translating between two languages (however you define them), when meaning starts to slide into a string of unintelligible symbols? That's the space that Christine Sun Kim's artworks occupy. Her drawings use systems of information - from musical scores to infographics to emojis - to question systemic dissonances between Hearing and Deaf cultures. The results straddle the line between semantic wordplay and semiotic breakdown, evidenced in the artist's current solo exhibition titled Trauma, LOL at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles."

"Talking Popcorn is a sound sculpture that evolved out of my interest in language, translation, and Morse Code. A microphone in the cabinet of the popcorn machine picks up sound of popping corn, and a computer hidden in the pedestal runs a custom-written program that translates the popping sounds according to the patterns and dictates of Morse Code. A computer-generated voice provides a simultaneous spoken translation."

"For three centuries, farmers living in the remote mountains of northern Turkey have communicated great distances by whistling. It's a language called kuş dili that is still used to this day, though fewer people are learning it in the age of the cell phone. It's also known as bird language, for obvious reasons. Muazzez Köçek lives in Kuşköy, and she is the best whistler in her village. Muazzez shows us how she uses varied pitch frequencies and melodies to translate Turkish vocabulary into whistles with meaning. "