ELYSIAN FIELDS | WEB ART: LINK

This multilingual (EN/CN) web artwork takes source material from the original “elysian fields”, poems written by my beloved friend Kathleen Ma. She references Sawako Nakayasu’s “Promenade” sequence in Mouth: Eats Color, where the poem “Promenade” is translated over 15 times, and the  “elysian field” sequence was her attempt at writing towards this kind of multiplication. I extend her multiplication by continuing to translate and revise her work into new poems of my own. 

Using HTML, CSS, and Javascript, I create a vessel through which her words can slowly unfold (page 1–elysian fields pt i, page 2 for elysian fields pt ii, and page 3 for elysian fields pt iii), and then extend the sequence through my own jumbled variations generated from a word bank. With each click, the participant scrambles the lines from each poem to be created into something new. As the final act, I encourage the participant to translate elysian fields into their own words, which will then be added to a word bank that will be used to generate elysian fields pt iv.

Translation is often an overlooked yet crucial role in shaping our perception of certain messages. When content native to one medium gets converted to another, when a person witnesses an event and recounts it to their friend. Information can be lost or manipulated at all times. 

What happens when you jumble them through a machine translation or someone else’s words? The machine translations show how we often place a lot of trust in machines to translate our intimate words to people we are closest with. There’s no knowing if it came out odd or incorrect, but this is the only choice we have since we do not have a common language.