The lost and found of meanings through layers of translation.
Lost And Found
Performance, Performance System, 2020
Carrie Sijia Wang
09/30/2020 Iteration 1: The eight rounds of translation between Chinese and English laid out in a sequence. Click on the image to enlarge.
In this video, text from a book by Wang Xiaobo loops through layers of mediation by my voice, the microphone on my macbook pro, speech-to-text API, and google translate. Some words are lost to simplicity, some replaced by phrases closer to the tech-centric, consumerist world these technologies live in (e.g. “Starbucks” and “Huawei” are among the words the program hears). And occasionally, poetry is refound in between the reconstructed lines.
From other iterations
Click on the images to see larger versions.
09/23/2020 Iteration 1
09/23/2020 Iteration 2
09/30/2020 Iteration 2
