in Gothen­burg in June 2015 at the NORLIT “The Future of the Book” con­fer­ence host­ed at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Gothen­burg in Swe­den, where she pre­sent­ed her work dur­ing the keynote of the con­fer­ence. The mul­ti­lin­gual, mul­ti­modal qual­i­ty of her work attracts the inter­est of oth­er artists as well as schol­ars in lit­er­ary, lin­guis­tic, and fine arts fields. After read­ing the avail­able schol­ar­ly arti­cles, announce­ments, pro­grams, and con­duct­ing an inter­view with her, I want­ed to offer a dia­logue, Sprach-Spiele through ver­bal and oth­er modes, set between the issues addressed in the con­tri­bu­tions to this spe­cial issue of Imag­i­na­tions and Rinne’s mul­ti­modal work. How does the chore­og­ra­phy of let­ters she per­forms on the page and else­where nuance the

Fig. 1

mean­ing of a word and what does that mean for print­ed text trans­la­tions? Do trans-modal or mul­ti-modal trans-lations—by way of read­ing, lay­out, type-set­ting, or dig­i­tal technology—accumulate into one mul­ti-lay­ered per­ceived mean­ing or do they pro­duce dif­fer­ent mean­ings through dif­fer­ent per­cep­tions? Can we all hear and see the same thing at the same time?

To pre­pare the game: Instead of pre­sent­ing the artist Cia Rinne here in the form of a con­ven­tion­al inter­view, this con­tri­bu­tion wants to stage a play­ground for thoughts and respons­es to her art­work and the top­ic of trans­la­tion. Draw­ing on pri­ma­ry sources, con­ver­sa­tions between the author, oth­er schol­ars and the poet, and the themes of this spe­cial issue, I attempt to show fur­ther pos­si­bil­i­ties for engag­ing, or spie­len (play­ing), the con­nec­tions between | trans­la­tion and visibility—and beyond.

SPIEL ONE

SPIEL 2: Thought (Seeing ↔ Listening)

SPIEL 3 – LIKE SPIEL OHNE? OHNO1

Fig. 3

Would you describe the changes that occur between dif­fer­ent modal­i­ties of a poem, oral­i­ty, print and ani­mat­ed print as a translation?

Yes, that could be called trans­la­tion. Some of the pieces in the archives zaroum I imag­ined as tac­tile objects, bod­i­ly. I had a sign in mind that could be flipped over and which on one side said ON, and on the oth­er side said NO. So I imag­ined a real­i­sa­tion in form of a revolv­ing move­ment right from the start. Cer­tain­ly not in dig­i­tal form, rather as an instal­la­tion, but the effect is sim­i­lar: through the rota­tions the word ON is some­times also read­able as NO, which illus­trates the graphemic con­nec­tion of both words. In a book, this can­not be shown so clear­ly because the words are print­ed one after the oth­er and sep­a­rate from each oth­er onto the page. This is why I used draw­ings in those cas­es. Like­wise, the inter­re­la­tion between the vers­es “TO GET HER” and “(togeth­er)” also work bet­ter in dig­i­tal form than in the book. The trans­la­tion into a dif­fer­ent modal­i­ty in this case is a com­po­si­tion, or a “neo-con­fig­u­ra­tion. This is also the case, when dif­fer­ent pieces are set togeth­er to make new piece, as, for exam­ple, for “Enough”, “rien / à / voir / dans / le / noir” and “DIFFERENCE / ici” from zaroum and their neo-con­fig­u­ra­tion in the archives zaroum. I believe these process­es reveal many dif­fer­ent lay­ers, which is alto­geth­er a form of trans­la­tion, from medi­um to medi­um. Exhi­bi­tions, which show my pieces, also trans­fer and trans­late text into oth­er con­texts, and in the process some­thing becomes real. I there­fore call poems that are dis­played in a par­tic­u­lar form dur­ing an exhi­bi­tion “real­i­sa­tion pieces”. (Ben­thien and Vor­rath 4-5, trans­la­tion mine)¹

The trans­la­tion between thought and lan­guage is not lim­it­ed to mov­ing between lin­guis­tic sys­tems in Rinne’s work. Rather one encoun­ters a sym­phon­ic orches­tra­tion of thought, sens­es, and lan­guage. The ques­tion is, of course, whether such an orches­tra­tion is only a mat­ter of the­o­ret­i­cal or aes­thet­ic per­spec­tive or whether this needs to be con­sid­ered for “nor­mal,” every­day use®s of lan­guage. Cur­rent neu­ro­log­i­cal research on how “i-media” (Swingle) influ­ences our cog­ni­tive devel­op­ment, social skills, and over­all com­mu­ni­ca­tion pat­terns sup­ports the lat­ter. The Amer­i­can psy­chother­a­pist and researcher Mari K. Swingle, for exam­ple, com­pares “i-speak,” in this case tex­ting or txt, with com­mu­ni­ca­tion prac­tices in mul­ti­lin­gual envi­ron­ments, such as sub-con­ver­sa­tions and lan­guage layering:

the way one choos­es to alter a word or phrase through pseu­do or new “spellings,” as well as emphat­ic emo­tive, and oth­er­wise mean­ing con­vey­ing for­mat­ting, indeed can cre­ate sub­tle but very dis­tinct dif­fer­ences. With tex­ting, one can very effi­cient­ly selec­tive­ly make mean­ing deep­er, more pre­cise, and yes, exclu­sive. Which brings me to a sec­ond fea­ture, the sub-con­ver­sa­tion. Again, pri­or to i-tech, this was a fea­ture exclu­sive to mul­ti­lin­gual indi­vid­u­als. Poly­glots, ful­ly know­ing what lan­guages peo­ple do or do not speak, switch lan­guages accord­ing­ly. (183)

The pat­tern Swingle iden­ti­fies for mixed-media com­mu­ni­ca­tion is that “com­mon con­ver­sa­tion,” which involves every­one at the din­ner table, so to speak, is “usu­al­ly ver­bal,” while “sub-con­ver­sa­tion,” which is selec­tive, is usu­al­ly “tech­no­log­i­cal­ly medi­at­ed.” In her assess­ment, such sub-con­ver­sa­tion or “switch­ing” by txt or oth­er i-media can, “if not mali­cious,” be enrich­ing and, “with i-tech and dig­i­tal natives” at least, has become a “reg­u­lar prac­tice” (183).

Swingle fur­ther points out that old­er “dig­i­tal immi­grants,” like myself, “miss the pos­i­tive poten­tial of screen tech­nol­o­gy” (183). Not in the sense that we might miss the prac­ti­cal, ped­a­gog­i­cal uses, but rather in the sense that some ideas can be trans­lat­ed bet­ter into dig­i­tal form, and that cer­tain dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion, which becomes avail­able by way of eth­i­cal data min­ing, might improve our under­stand­ing of and poli­cies for con­tem­po­rary society.

Some of Rinne’s ideas, such as “turn on” and “to get her,” work bet­ter as pieces trans­lat­ed into dig­i­tal form than pieces trans­lat­ed into print form. Anoth­er way of look­ing at this is by way of Sil­via Pireddu’s analy­sis of cat­a­logue trans­la­tion in this spe­cial issue of Imag­i­na­tions. I believe that her assess­ment that a “fail­ure to nego­ti­ate and adapt trans­la­tion to such mul­ti­ple polar­i­ties” (that come into play when ver­bal and visu­al infor­ma­tion exist in a shared space) “may lead to vary­ing degrees of inter­pre­tive break­down on the part of the end-user” is not only applic­a­ble to trans­la­tion as a prod­uct but also as a dis­ci­pline. If the old­er “dig­i­tal immi­grants” do not par­take, in oth­er words, fail to nego­ti­ate and adapt their view of trans­la­tion to i-tech, this may lead to vary­ing degrees of inter­pre­tive break­down on the part of the end-user, that is between old­er and younger gen­er­a­tions of trans­la­tors, between teach­ers (and schol­ars) and stu­dents enrolled in trans­la­tion stud­ies programs.

Dig­i­tal mul­ti­me­dia writ­ing (and trans­la­tion) oper­ates from an entire­ly dif­fer­ent neu­ro­log­i­cal plat­form: one that mines the lat­est neu­ro­log­i­cal find­ings about colour pref­er­ences, ori­en­ta­tions in for­eign envi­ron­ments, and psy­cho­log­i­cal pre­dis­po­si­tions, as well as per­son­al data to pro­duce irre­sistible prod­ucts for their “read­ers.” In oth­er words, dig­i­tal writ­ing oper­ates in a val­ue sys­tem that encour­ages the exploita­tion of humans and empha­sizes prof­it mak­ing with­out clear­ly defined eth­i­cal bound­aries. Thomas Met­zinger describes this as the entrance to an era which rede­fines the con­cept “humans”:

Neu­ro-psy­cho­log­i­cal research itself offers noth­ing that […] could lead to a prac­ti­ca­ble eth­ic and ground­ed con­sen­sus for every­day life. There­fore, and because we must not con­fuse “das Sein”, that which is, with “Sollen”, that which ought to be; we need to con­front the find­ings of mod­ern brain research keep­ing two mat­ters care­ful­ly apart: How is the human in real­i­ty? And how should the human be in the future? (54, trans­la­tion mine)²

Schol­ar­ly pro­grams that do not address these ques­tions leave the next gen­er­a­tions of stu­dents and trans­la­tors to become com­plic­it in the pro­duc­tion of what sev­er­al philoso­phers (Precht; Met­zinger), neu­rother­a­pists, behav­iourists, and psy­chother­a­pists (Green­field; Rosen; Swingle), as well as media and com­mu­ni­ca­tions experts (Ols­son et al.) now refer to as risk-technology.

From this dif­fer­ence in read­ing and writ­ing arrives also a prob­lem of inter­pre­ta­tion or com­mu­ni­ca­tion between old­er “dig­i­tal immi­grants” and younger “dig­i­tal natives.” While we may assume that the old­er gen­er­a­tion draws on a reli­gious­ly informed or intu­itive­ly holis­tic under­stand­ing of human beings, dig­i­tal immi­grants might actu­al­ly lack this wider nor­ma­tive frame of ref­er­ence. The grow­ing pri­va­ti­za­tion of the lan­guage indus­try, that is, the struc­tur­al trend towards self-employed free­lancers fol­low­ing the eco­nom­ic down­turn since 2009, is leav­ing this gen­er­a­tion vul­ner­a­ble to eco­nom­ic exploita­tion that has begun to trans­form their under­stand­ing of soci­ety and of them­selves (Moorkens). We might still wor­ry whether machine-aid­ed trans­la­tion is advanc­ing or destroy­ing trans­la­tion, which implies that machine and human trans­la­tion com­pete with each oth­er. Mean­while, dig­i­tal trans­la­tion is absorb­ing the trans­la­tor, min­ing their exper­tise (through spe­cial­ly designed pro­grams) and con­fus­ing ideas about who they real­ly are with ideas about how they ought to pro­duce.³

SPIEL 4 (in) 3 - Part A: REFLECTIONS

Fig. 4

Rinne describes her work as a way of “try­ing to get as far away as pos­si­ble from writ­ing,” through which she then shows “that which is hid­den in the lan­guage” (Kölling/Rinne 2018, Tran­skript). The con­trib­u­tors to this spe­cial edi­tion have all tak­en their point of reflec­tion from a form that is oth­er to translation—a cov­er, a poster, a web­site, a cat­a­logue, an exhi­bi­tion, an idea, a news­pa­per arti­cle, a book of poetry—to show that which is hid­den in trans­la­tion. They out­line cur­rent devel­op­ments in mixed-mode trans­la­tion and how this might affect the user. What is more, they address the grow­ing polar­iza­tions between ver­bal trans­la­tion and i-tech in the form of a pro­duc­tive con­ver­sa­tion: not tak­ing one side or the oth­er, but try­ing to form a view which turns ideas togeth­er. Such a view begins to acknowl­edge that there is a grow­ing read­er­ship for whom read­ing is more than fol­low­ing lines of let­ters on the page, deci­pher­ing the words and assign­ing a dic­tio­nary mean­ing to them. “Dig­i­tal natives” are all-at-once read­ers: images, let­ters, sounds, etc.—and they are capa­ble of pro­duc­ing trans­la­tions in this mixed-mode. And it is impor­tant to under­stand how they real­ly do it in order to have an informed dis­cus­sion about whether they should do it. To con­tin­ue to take for grant­ed that trans­la­tion is pri­mar­i­ly a ver­bal mode might not only lead to grow­ing break-downs of inter­pre­ta­tion between dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions of trans­la­tors, it might also mean that those who do not par­take in this dig­i­tal shift will not be part of shap­ing its norms.⁵

SPIEL (in) 3 PART B: What would there be if there was not me?

Fig. 5

One detail that Rinne shared with me in my inter­view with her sur­prised me: her self-descrip­tion of being a lone­ly work­er, where­as my first impres­sion was that her pieces (archives zaroum, sounds for soloists) were most­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive in nature—or a shared expe­ri­ence at least. For me, her projects seemed co-oper­a­tive, indebt­ed to con­crete poet­ry as much as new advance­ments in dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy. This cross-pol­li­na­tion of con­crete poet­ry with dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy has led me to explore the rela­tion­ship between ana­logue and dig­i­tal modes of trans­la­tion deep­er than I anticipated.

SPIEL 3 PART 3: THE FULL PICTURE: MATERIE (The Idea of a Concrete Translator)

Writ­ing on the page is a sin­gu­lar task: one puts a pen to paper. In the­o­ry, it could be entire­ly pos­si­ble that a writer has pro­duced all of the nec­es­sary tools—paper, ink, and feather—for this enter­prise. Typ­ing, how­ev­er, makes it more like­ly that one needs to draw on the skills of oth­ers for the pro­duc­tion of a type­writer, car­bon paper, and ink rib­bon. Nowa­days, it seems near impos­si­ble that a sin­gle per­son has built the entire materie, the machine, pro­grammed the soft­ware, and so on from which writ­ing is made.

Fig. 6

Writ­ing has become a much more com­mu­nal pro­duc­tion process and it might become entire­ly out­mod­ed for “dig­i­tal natives” to view writ­ing still as an indi­vid­ual task. What, for exam­ple, is my posi­tion in the pro­duc­tion process of this writ­ing? Just a dot in the dig­i­tal space? I am acute­ly aware of the nec­es­sary materie that I alone can­not pro­duce nor bring to life. I am not a lone­ly work­er at all.

Rinne’s pieces estab­lish rela­tions, with her audi­ence and through coop­er­a­tion, by way of link­ing dif­fer­ent lan­guages and modes. I want to use the idea of these rela­tions and entan­gle­ments as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reimag­ine translation—to break with the image of the trans­la­tor as a lone­ly work­er, as well as that of trans­la­tion as a prod­uct of indi­vid­ual consumption.

POSTSCRIPT:EXIT

Materie. Pro­duc­tion, con­sump­tion. Vis­i­bil­i­ty & Trans­la­tion. Each of the con­trib­u­tors to this issue argues and shows with the mate­r­i­al they present and exam­ine that trans­la­tions and their vis­i­bil­i­ty is a social task, name­ly that of imag­in­ing and reimag­in­ing a plan­et pop­u­lat­ed with diverse com­mu­ni­ties, human and other.

Rinne sent me four pho­tographs tak­en from “the let­ter i see” exhi­bi­tion at the Kumu Art Muse­um in Tallinn, which exhibits A3 braille-prints. Two of the pho­tographs show peo­ple look­ing at her works, the oth­er two just show her works in the emp­ty exhi­bi­tion space. These images plant­ed a seed, a visu­al jux­ta­po­si­tion and metaphor, which grew to full thought dur­ing a vis­it to anoth­er exhi­bi­tion in London.

On 8 Novem­ber 2019, a friend invit­ed me to see Ola­fur Eliasson’s “In Real Life” exhi­bi­tion at the Tate Mod­ern in Lon­don. It is a pecu­liar expe­ri­ence. Elias­son con­structs nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na, often focussing on process­es, such as rain run­ning down a win­dow pane or ice melt­ing, where­by he draws atten­tion to the socio-aes­thet­ic con­struct­ed­ness of “nature.”

“Did we come here to get wet?” a man asks me while I am enter­ing Eliasson’s “Beau­ty” (1993) instal­la­tion. It star­tles me. One is rarely spo­ken to at exhi­bi­tions, let alone by strangers. Nor­mal­ly, the art space is a space of qui­et visu­al consumption.

“Beau­ty” is a cur­tain of mist illu­mi­nat­ed by spot­lights which re-cre­ate the spec­tral phe­nom­e­non of a rain­bow (FIGURE 7). When I enter the black­ened room, I first expe­ri­ence sur­prise. The humid air set­tles on my skin, I feel cold, my eyes adjust to the dark rather slow­ly. I reg­is­ter the rain­bow at the same time that the man speaks to me. I look at him. He smiles at me and I smile back. A ques­tion, a con­nec­tion. I look back at the rain­bow, try­ing to fig­ure out what we are here for.

Fig. 7

The answer, my answer to the stranger’s ques­tion, comes to me as I spend per­haps twen­ty min­utes observ­ing the space. The beau­ty of this instal­la­tion lies not in the rain­bow itself. It lies in how vis­i­tors inter­act with it. The vis­i­tors do get wet: they posi­tion them­selves with­in the rain­bow to have their pho­tographs tak­en by their spouse or friend or anoth­er fam­i­ly member.

Their expres­sions are full of joy as they do so. It is joy­ous to wit­ness this. For a moment, I feel dis­ap­point­ed because I can­not par­tic­i­pate. I have no excuse to step into the rain­bow and break the bar­ri­er between observ­er and being observed because I am alone here. And I pre­fer the role of spec­ta­tor. I feel uncom­fort­able becom­ing part of this spec­ta­cle, being looked at.

“Beau­ty” invokes a sense of togeth­er­ness which becomes even more promi­nent as I enter the “Din blinde pas­sager” (“Your blind pas­sen­ger,” 2010) instal­la­tion. “Din blinde pas­sager” is a 39-meter-long cor­ri­dor full of dense fog, which cuts vis­i­bil­i­ty down to a claus­tro­pho­bic arm’s length (FIGURE 8). It is hard to breathe and move. My eyes, which can­not fix on any­thing to find ori­en­ta­tion in the fog, switch into some kind of over­drive. They search and search and search the fog. This coin­cides with short­short­short intakes of breath. The phys­i­cal response to the expe­ri­ence is dra­ma­tized by the effect of oth­er blind pas­sen­gers appear­ing (relief) and dis­ap­pear­ing (dis­com­fort) in the fog. Judg­ing by their ges­tures, their expe­ri­ences are sim­i­lar to my own.

Fig. 8

I could have left this detour through Elisasson’s exhi­bi­tion out of this arti­cle. Per­haps you find it dis­tract­ing as you read this. But to me it is a punc­tu­al note of the pro­duc­tion process. The pho­tographs show­ing “Beau­ty” and “Din blinde pas­sager” that I includ­ed here are tak­en from Elisasson’s web­site and the web­site of an online review­er of his exhi­bi­tion in the Lon­don Tate Mod­ern in 2019. The images are rep­re­sen­ta­tive of how his works have been cap­tured for archival and pro­mo­tion­al pur­pos­es, as well as for the encour­age­ment of aca­d­e­m­ic and emo­tive dis­course (for a more detailed dis­cus­sion of visu­al­i­ty and trans­la­tion in the con­text of visu­al art and exhi­bi­tions see the con­tri­bu­tions of Ingram, Per­ry, and Pired­du to this issue). This is a pho­to­graph I took while vis­it­ing the exhibition:

Fig. 9

There are sev­er­al points of con­nec­tion between Eliasson’s and Rinne’s work. Both are forms of trans­la­tion which man­age in a Brecht­ian sense to make strange norms of see­ing and visu­al mean­ing-mak­ing. In Eliasson’s instal­la­tions, the roles of nature (which is con­struct­ed) and nat­ur­al (how vis­i­tors are phys­i­cal­ly affect­ed by the instal­la­tion) are invert­ed, just as the role of see­ing let­ters and read­ing by touch are invert­ed in Rinne’s exhi­bi­tion of braille prints.

This inver­sion is not based on the assump­tion that vis­i­tors gift­ed with sight can­not read braille but on the infor­ma­tion in the images that Rinne sent me: the vis­i­tors view the prints with their hands in their pock­ets with light­bulbs placed above the prints for bet­ter visibility.

Both Elias­son and Rinne thus employ the art space to invite the vis­i­tor to a meta-dia­logue about con­struct­ed oth­ers and/or else­wheres. The norm becomes strange. Vis­i­bil­i­ty becomes strange. The first two pho­tographs draw atten­tion to the vis­i­tors view­ing the art­work, empha­sized by the light­bulbs which are need­ed to see (and thus also empha­siz­ing the conun­drum staged by the artwork).

The lat­ter two images, because they are “emp­ty”, white and with­out peo­ple, empha­size the point of view from which the pho­tographs are tak­en, mean­ing, the fact that the image focus­es my view on re-enact­ing/repli­cat­ing the sole spec­ta­tor con­sump­tion behav­iour, and thus excludes the pos­si­bil­i­ty of becoming/perceiving myself as a par­tic­i­pant in a com­mu­nal and sol­idary act.

This is my con­clu­sion, then:

Fig. 14

The art of trans­la­tion is not the fin­ished prod­uct, but the way in which we inter­act with it and share our inter­ac­tion with oth­ers, and through the inver­sion of pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion by adding our thoughts, ideas, ques­tions and reac­tions, leer becomes voll.

I would like to thank the edi­tors and review­ers for their thought­ful com­ments and efforts towards improv­ing this con­tri­bu­tion, Cia Rinne for her time and thought-inspir­ing art­work, and Patrick Spot­tis­woode for the tick­et to Ola­fur Eliasson’s exhi­bi­tion at the Tate Modern.