April 01, 2005
trans-mute
Filling in the Blanks
"Performance artist Daniela Sneppova’s text trans-mute has been published in the online journal ephemera as an interactive reading/translating experience. The following introduces the essay of her process oriented experiment - showing an understanding of the performative in general as an active communicative process...
"This textual representation moves between the inspiration – the triggers that led to the creation of the performance – and a description of what the audience participated in. The blacked out, missing text performs a number of functions. It refers to the acts of censorship by many Eastern European countries before the fall of Communism: Censors frequently obscured words or phrases in personal correspondence sent between nations, families and friends. [blogged by mo--ka on mind_ _the GAP*? ]
The missing text also seeks to reproduce the gaps and silences of translation. It is difficult to discern what is left out of a translation. We take for granted that what is missing from a translated text. However, I am interested in the cumulative effects of these ‘minor’ absences. Thus the invisibility of absence is something that is explored in the on-line project. The on-line project offers a different kind of text with which the user must actively engage; an environment of sound and images that responds to mouse movements and clicks. The blacked out text is meant to remind readers of the on-line dimension of this project. Readers will always make connections when reading any text; in this article that process is exaggerated, encouraging readers to ‘fill in the blanks.’"
This on-line version of trans-mute is an integration of a text translation and a digital translation of a performance that took place in Barcelona, 2002.
Posted by jo at April 1, 2005 07:11 AM
