Art220/
Fall 2004
Project 1
Title: EntropicDisremeberance
The EntropicDisrememberance is a chaotic dialogue/narrative weaver. By unknowingly selecting words and putting a curser onto moving images, texts in the ASCII field are replaced in English, Latin, and Italian, and the original texts are scrambled and refreshed into oblivion.
Latin, Italian, English, and ASCII are used for this project to express a genetic classification of languages. The common ancestor of each language family creates branches and subfamilies. My project reflects that people translate from the original language into each translator’s filtering system which consists of their own semantic values, knowledge and idealization. On the other hand, codes (in this case, ASCII) output and translate the data as it is – without subjectively manipulating the meaning of data.
The core of the field portrays a dual existence (“I”, “me”). Cubes as aviators of action sensors which call texts to the ASCII field, they are bounded in each pseudo-biospheres of each linguistic field; English, Latin, Italian, and ASCII. In the English field, the core contains a cube which calls the first person “I” to the ASCII field, when users overlay a cursor on the cube. When a user clicks on the cube or the sphere-shaped field, more new cubes will appear. The English filed has two more external layers: the first layer contains the first person “I” and “me”, the second layer contains the third person (“he”, “she”, etc). The reason there is no second person “you” in this setting is because the original text is a love story between a man and a woman who interpret each other’s behavior subjectivity within their closed world. Therefore, the third layer contains verbs and nouns which can be often used to portray such emotions. Finally, the fourth layer contains Latin and Italian which are translations of texts in the English field.
Maturana
wrote that feelings are secondary to language. Barthes wrote that “a
narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: (narrative) is
simply there, like life itself.”(Image, Music, Text. 1977)
Combining their ideas, the first section of the Dante Alighieri’s sonnet
“New Life” is used for the project because it is a love story
which evokes each character’s subjective points of views. Narratives
have influenced our emotions through movies, fictions, non-fictions, and in
our daily conversation which are, I suppose, constructed by each individual’s
rationalizations, and filtered through each individuals’ value system.
The Japanese film maker, Mamoru Oshii who portrays artificial life in the
genre of science fiction uses quotes from many well-known philosophers for
his scripts. The reason of this as he states; “because I want to prove
how unimportant the dialogue is in the movie. It’s just a part of the
many details, and you don’t have to pay attention to any of the dialogue
in order to understand.” He may wish to defy the “traditional”
concept of dialogues in narratives which have made his audience feel that
they understand the contents of narratives with their own definitions of semantic
meanings.
