Relevant To My Interests - Tumblr Posts
Note also the project mentioned half-way down the page about translating the specific couplets.
This conference is p awesome, so many amazing projects I’m learning about.
Something else amazing I didn’t realise I needed in my life.
Published by the London Review of Books, 8 November 2012
In Anne Carson’s six translations of Ibykos, the mode of fidelity to the source text varies not according to the closeness of cross-lingual synonyms but according to the spirit of the translation. It is an extreme example of a translator bringing herself and her own ideas into a text, and also an effective one—if her goal is not to replicate Ibykos but to play with his work.
(cp. 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei [Eliot Weinberger, Octavio Paz]; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird [Wallace Stevens])
Another really cool art-writing-translation project.
Zero Negative Cero negativo is a collection of stories in English and Spanish, by Isabel del Río. The stories are ‘translations’ or ‘re-writings’ of each other that are sometimes fairly close in sense and sometimes diverge from each other far more than we would traditionally expect of a ‘translation’.
my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.
and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
Data Weave
Kickstarter from @notendo to make high quality woven textile garments with digital abstraction based on digital files:
Data Weave continues work I began in 2001 that reimagines contemporary digital culture through textile arts to create a continuum of traditional and modern art forms and technologies. Applying my process of color encoding binary data to textiles expands fiber art traditions and addresses current preservation challenges faced by digital media.
… Data Weave is a marriage of art forms to the extent that the Jacquard loom’s use of punch cards to weave intricate motifs inspired the use of punch cards for saving and executing programs in early computing. Data Weave extends traditions of embedding symbols in textiles to communicate information by applying my practice of color coding binaries to weaving. This process of encoding data with color produces intricately detailed, cascading motifs that are meant to be woven pixel to stitch. Each pixel represents bits of data showing how weaving can also be understood as pixel art. Furthermore, Data Weave simultaneously illustrates an alternate way of data preservation and a materialization of digital ephemera by tangibly elucidating data structures with color.
More Here
Watch the video and read more about this brilliantly simple project.