Recent
critical discourse about electronic literature has focused
on a fundamental question: “Where is the text?”
In analyzing works of digital literature, should we read the
onscreen text, the programming code, or a combination of
both? Early discussions of electronic literature and digital
textuality grappled with the fact that digital works contain
multiple layers of text. Distinguishing between these layers
prompted Espen Aarseth (1997) to articulate a taxonomy of “scriptons”
and “textons” and inspired others, like Loss
Pequeño Glazier (2002), to advocate for a critical
practice that reads the source code as the real text. The
most recent Modern Language Association conference
(Philadelphia, December 2006) included a panel titled
'Reading Code' (chaired by Rita Raley); in it Mark Marino
introduced and advocated for Critical Code Studies, a method
of reading programmable code which would enable critics to ‘analyze
and explicate code as a text, as a sign system with its own
rhetoric, as verbal communication that possesses
significance in excess of its functional utility’
[n.p.].[1]
Marino (2006) writes, ‘In effect, I am proposing that
we can read and explicate code the way we might explicate a
work of literature’ [n.p.]. Other critics warn
against reading code as text, arguing that the division
between text and code lies not at the level of interface but
in the processes of execution. For example, Florian Cramer
(2002) explains that text becomes code only when it runs: it
‘is solely dependent on how another piece of code – a
compiler, a runtime interpreter or the embedded logic of a
microprocessor – processes it’ [n.p].
John Cayley (2002) highlights the fact that ‘composed
code is addressed to a processor’ and ‘complexities
of address should not be bracketed’ [n.p].
These critics share a distinction between text and code that
relies on the identification of the screen as a dividing
interface between human and computer readers, a boundary
between the execution and the representation of textuality.
This essay participates in the current discussion by
reconsidering the screen not merely as a surface separating
code from text but also as itself a representational layer
that, when examined, can provide crucial insights into the
relationship between the executable code and its
end-product. To show how this plays out at the level of
interpretation, I read a literary work whose onscreen
performance promotes an examination into its coded
performance but limits such examination to the screen. This
reflexive move, I argue, stimulates a similar assessment of
our analytical methods for reading and discussing works of
electronic literature.
Electronic literature is the result of the performance of
executable code being processed by the computer. As new
media critics, we know this and have rightly dedicated
extensive analysis to examining the effects of this material
fact on the experience of reading. But there has been less
critical engagement actually reading literary works to see
how they themselves participate in and respond to this
situation and the critical discourse it inspires. By
considering how digital texts conceptualize their own
relationship to ongoing critical discussions, I am not
encouraging a return to a screenic approach of reading
electronic literature that focuses solely on what is visible
onscreen. However, neither should we abandon the practice of
reading electronic literature as literature, for its
narratives and aesthetic strategies might have something to
say onscreen about its coded operations and semiosis.
Instead of addressing what code does for our readings of
electronic literature, then, this paper considers what
electronic literature can do for our discussions of code.
Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Nippon
serves as my tutor text because the online work represents
the relationship between screenic text and computer code as
one based on a process they share: translation.
Nippon is not codework; it does not display a
mixture of computer code and English
onscreen.[2]
Nor does it visibly engage in discussions of code,
computers, or digital culture in either its form or content.
Yet, as I will argue, Nippon aesthetically depicts
translation as a metaphor for the acts of compilation
happening beneath the screen. Recognizing translation to be
a key principle of digital literature provides a perspective
for reading Nippon and engaging in critical
discussions about electronic literature that is neither
focused on the onscreen text nor the computational code but
which illuminates the symbiosis enabling both.
2.
Translation: the Heart of Electronic
Literature
Nippon’s interface displays an aesthetic of
translation, as the following screenshot reveals.
Figure
1: Screenshot from Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’s
Nippon.
Japanese
and English occupy opposite sides of a horizontally-divided
screen. Nippon thus presents an opportunity for
translation onscreen. Like all of their works, Young-hae
Chang Heavy Industries’s (YHCHI) use Flash to produce
fast, flashing narratives choreographed to a jazz
soundtrack. When the music speeds up so does the text. The
Flash-ing animation proceeds in a temporal, multimodal
performance that lasts almost seventeen minutes. But this
bilingual work proves to be decisively different than the
rest of YHCHI’s oeuvre: when Nippon begins
the languages flash in synchronicity to the same beat and
tell the same story, but with the introduction of
syncopation into the jazz track, the languages diverge
across the dividing line. Each language begins to flash to a
different instrument: English to the trumpet, Japanese to
the piano. As the music accelerates, so too does the text.
The visual dialectic is strengthened by the contrasting
colors of the screen, an adaptation of the colors of the
Japanese flag. In the upper part of the screen, Japanese
appears as red text against a white backdrop; in the bottom
register, English is presented in white against red. The
languages dance and clash in a performance that
aesthetically depicts the traffic of translation happening
between and across them. The effect is an audio-visual
dialogue between two languages and the cultures they
represent, two nations who are central players in advancing
global technology and the technoculture of the World Wide
Web upon which Nippon is accessed.
The relationship between East and West is intimately tied to
digital technology and is both the subtext and context for
reading Nippon. Recent criticism has examined the
role of this relationship in the emergence and
popularization of Internet culture and has identified
Orientialism as playing a vital part in this process. In
Control and Freedom Wendy Chun (2005) argues that
U.S. and Japanese cyberpunk narratives helped popularize the
Internet by presenting cyberspace through the guise of
Orientalism. Chun reminds us that cyberspace is a literary
invention that emerged from a genre which, she argues, is
deeply dependent upon techno-Orientalism. Chun writes that
William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the cyberpunk
classic that gave the world the word "cyberspace", presented
an Oriental landscape ready to ‘be conquered and made
to submit& [so that] &entering cyberspace is
analogous to opening up the Orient’ (188). The result:
‘[c]yberspace as disembodied representation rehearses
themes of Oriental exoticism and Western penetration’
(188) and ‘the narrative of the Internet as
Orientalist space accompanies narratives of the Internet as
disembodied space’ (244). Like other acts of
Orientalism before it, the most recent use of the Orient as
an “other” space open to the projection and
proliferation of Western fantasies depends upon a coupling
between Orient and Internet that enables a vision, or ‘hallucination’
(as Jacques Derrida might call it),[3]
of cyberspace which is both universal and disembodied.
Nippon aesthetically displays this situation in
order to complicate it. Its visual allusion to the Japanese
flag provides a backdrop for an interaction between the
languages of Japan and the United States which serves to
represent and challenge notions that either cyberspace or
computer code are disembodied or universal. Nippon’s
narrative never directly discusses digital technologies, the
Internet, or the culture of transnational capitalism;
however, the effects of this technoculture provide its
centrifugal force. Translating the content of
Nippon into an interpretation about the digital
moment in which it exists is an act of reading between the
lines, a reading strategy that Nippon encourages.
The work reorients the ways in which we read between
ideogrammic and alphanumeric text as a means of promoting a
similar reading strategy for approaching the relationship
between onscreen text and the code compiling it. Without
explicitly displaying or discussing code, Nippon
reminds its reader that computers, their operations and
codes, and the ways in which they are discussed are never
separate from but always embedded in human contexts,
cultures, and constellations of power.
Reading between and across the human languages depicted
onscreen provides a metaphor for reading between and across
the interface dividing the translations between machine and
human language. YHCHI employ compilation as a literary tool
and aesthetic technique to reference the acts of translation
enabling the presentation of their digital aesthetic.
Compilation is translation at the heart of digital
computing. The compiler is that program or set of programs
which translates one computer language (source code) into
another (target code). I use “compilation” as a
technological metaphor for a literary strategy that seeks to
engage and aestheticize the actual acts of compilation which
are, by necessity, invisible and unavailable to the reader.
The fact that Nippon is created in Flash
exacerbates the inaccessibility of its code, for Flash
renders its source code unavailable to the reader. Unlike
codeworks which, as Rita Raley (2002) explains, ‘make[]
exterior the interior workings of the computer,’
Nippon does not depict code onscreen
[n.p].[4]
Whereas codeworks present the interaction between human and
computer languages in a form of hybridized text displayed
onscreen, YHCHI’s flashing narrative represents this
relationship as a temporal performance whose onscreen
aesthetic indexes the acts of computational translation
happening beneath the screen. It thus presents an
opportunity to extend the insights offered by critics of
codework to works of digital literature whose onscreen
textual aesthetics express and signify the acts of
translation happening beneath the screen.
Nippon shows translation to be at the heart of
digital literature and of our critical engagements with it.
It does so before the work even begins. Its title is a
translation, or more accurately a transliteration, of the
Japanese articulation of “Japan.” In addition,
Nippon’s soundtrack is also transliterated:
the text flashes to “Kojo No Tsuki (a.k.a. ‘Japanese
Folk Song’)”, recorded by Thelonious Monk.
Containing translation and transliteration, the song’s
title identifies the non-semantic language of music as also
implicated in and affected by translation. The music
provides the soundtrack for the choreographed, textual
performance which depicts the central role of translation in
enabling digital information and its interpretation.
Onscreen, Nippon juxtaposes two languages and thus
sets up an opportunity for translation between them that is
dashed by the actual, animated presentation of the text. Due
to the speed of the flashing words, even a reader fluent in
both languages is unable to read both texts simultaneously.
Instead, the reader grows acutely aware of the failure of
human translation to keep up with the other reader
concurrently working to translate Nippon’s
text – the computer. The work reminds its human
reader that the computer is a partner in its multilingual
performance; the computer’s circuitry and protocols
(particularly since it is accessed online) are involved in
the production and dissemination of Nippon’s
textual animation. While the human reader cannot
simultaneously read both texts, the computer performs
technical translations on both languages without
understanding the meaning of the words it
processes.[5]
It is neither the computer nor the human (author or reader)
alone, but rather the partnership between them, that produce
the work. Nippon thus directs discussions away from
a rarefied thing called “code” towards an
awareness that translation happens across protocols,
platforms, and readers. The speeding juxtaposition of
languages onscreen in Nippon thwarts efforts at
translation by the human reader in order to make visible the
fact that translation is at the heart of digital computing.
The computer is essentially a translation machine, and the
translation of computer code into human language produces
electronic literature. At its most basic level, all digital
information is translated into binary digits. What one reads
onscreen is the result of a series of translations across
circuits and systems, programming languages and software;
these translations are processed in response to the input of
human users – both the programmer, whose instructions
drive the operations, and the reader/user/consumer, whose
interactions procure them. Thus, translation is not only
depicted onscreen in Nippon but is enacted in the
computing processes that enable the work to perform.
Computer scientist and Artificial Intelligence innovator
Terry Winograd (1984) explains, ‘[i]n the
popular mythology the computer is a mathematics machine; it
is designed to do numerical calculations. Yet it is really a
language machine; its fundamental power lies in its ability
to manipulate linguistic tokens – symbols to which
meaning has been assigned’ (131). The ability to ‘manipulate
linguistic tokens’, to transform binary code, over a
series of machinic operations, into screenic text is
translation. Literature is, of course, also made meaningful
through acts of translation.
Literature is text that translates one person’s ideas,
emotions, and stories into language that can be shared and
interpreted by another person. Indeed, one meaning of the
verb form of “translate” is ‘to interpret,
explain; to expound the significance of &also to express
(one thing) in terms of another’ (OED
online). Not only is this what literature does, but it is
what literature strives to do: to produce interpretation and
translation. That is why the definition of “interpretation”
in the OED includes the following: ‘the
action of translating’ [n.p.]. As Steven
Mailloux (1990) writes, in his extended definition of “interpretation”
in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ‘“interpretation”
conveys the sense of a translation pointed in two directions
simultaneously: toward a text to be interpreted and
for an audience in need of interpretation’
(121, original emphasis). The bi-directional focus of
translation is made evident and manifest in digital
literature, which exists and operates through acts of
machinic translation which are literally ‘pointed in
two directions simultaneously’: towards the computer
and human reader for different acts of translation and
interpretation. Nippon illuminates how literature
and the reading strategies through which we approach it –
i.e. interpretative translation – are affected by
the role of machinic translation in emergent, digital
literature. The work displays and supports Katherine Hayles’s
(2005) claim that ‘[l]anguage alone is no
longer the distinctive characteristic of technologically
developed societies; rather, it is language plus code’
(16). The languages in Nippon are literally a
manifestation of ‘language plus code’. Their
presentation onscreen promotes an emergent reading strategy
necessary for approaching the content of this hybrid form of
textuality.
Nippon illuminates the role that translation plays
in digital textuality in order to complicate discourse about
machine translation and, in particular, the relationship
between code and text. Machinic translation has been an
essential aspect and central ambition of digital computing
since its emergence after World War II. In ‘Machine
Translation and Global English’, Rita Raley (2003)
identifies machine translation as a central agenda shared by
computing pioneers Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener, who
envisioned a super-computer that would apply crytographic
techniques acquired during WWII to all translation (291).
Translation is therefore both a central ambition
for the computer and a central operating process
of the computer. Raley reads this ambition for
machine translation from a critical position informed by
poststructuralist thought and identifies its ideological
blind spots: ‘machine translation tries to posit a
kind of universality and transparency to translation&
[that] &operates around and with English as a
pivot language; as the dominant language for computational
linguistic and engineering research’
(300).[6]
The role of machine translation in computing history prompts
Raley to identify translation as ‘the very site of
such struggles where the guest language is forced to
encounter the host language, where the irreducible
differences between them are fought out, authorities invoked
or challenges, ambiguities dissolved’ (294).
Nippon depicts a ‘site of such struggles’
onscreen as a crucial location for investigating cultural,
technological, and political conflicts related to the
digital technology and discourse about code.
.
3. Reading between the Lines
Nippon’s narrative appears worlds away from
critical discussions about compilation and computation. The
title is the only indication of geographical location given;
besides this hint, the narrative could happen anywhere (or,
at least, in any urban setting). It is, in a sense,
universal. Nippon narrates the thoughts, actions,
and interactions of a group of businessmen and “working
women” in an after-hours brothel-bar, a night amidst
the “world’s oldest profession.” The
unnamed characters are archetypes: the domineering madam,
the leggy, lust-inspiring singer, the man who flirts with
the prostitute while praising his loyal wife. The male
characters make excuses for being out rather than at home,
and the stories they tell are so common that the female
listeners have ‘HEARD THIS— KIND —
ØF — STØRY— MANY — TIMES.’[7]
Nippon creates a microcosm around its archetypal
characters. Smoke and music envelop the characters while the
reader feels the suffocating effects of the work’s
bright colors, fast-flashing text, and loud music. The
action remains contained in a single room over the temporal
scope of a single night. From within these neoclassical
perimeters emerges a narrative that is not only archetypal
but universal. Through this universal narrative, however,
Nippon presents a critique that subtly complicates
the concept of “world wide” in “World Wide
Web” and the effect of such universalizing ideologies
on critical discourse about code and text.
Instead of directly addressing such topics, however,
Nippon portrays a situation that needs little
translation but whose subtext, like the computer code
enabling it, is only visible by reading between the lines of
the narrative. The men in the bar are co-workers but not
friends, and although the evening occurs after-hours and in
an environment distinct form the office-space that contains
their gray-suited, daytime efforts, the activities in the
bar are still work. The outing is a result of
info-industrialization and what Alan Liu (2004) calls ‘knowledge
work’, (77) from which there is ‘no true
recreational outside’ (77). The workers, both the male
customers and the female escorts, labor to listen to their ‘HØST’,
who is also their boss. While he speaks, they ‘THINK—
FØND— THØUGHTS— ØF—
DEATH— AND NØTHINGNESS’. This is a ‘HIGH-CLASS
CLUB’ where the men drink ‘FIRST-CLASS WHISKEY’,
but anxiety lurks beneath the details of financial privilege
and deepens with each drink. The narrative alternates
between first and third-person points-of-view, shifting
between the perspectives of the women, the men, and an
omniscient narrator. All of the characters are in the midst
of on-the-job education. An experienced voice prompts the
working women to turn the tables and regard their male
clients as laborers who ‘WØRK FØR
YØU, — SWEAT — FØR—
YØU’. Instructions follow: ‘LEAN—
YØUR— HEAD— BACK— AND — LET—THE—
SMØKE— ØUT— LIKE— A SIGH, —
A— LØSS— REGRET— THAT —HE—
CAN SØØTHE’. The men also experience
their after-hours entertainment as a form of labor: ‘EVERYØNE—
MAKES AN EFFØRT— TØ— BE —
SØCIABLE’. All of this is under the auspice of
working for the ‘HØST.’ More like a
parasitic host than a Christian one, this host supplies his
guests (the male and female employees) with drinks and
stories about his love for his mother; in turn, he depends
upon their laughter and attention. At the end of the night
and of Nippon’s animation, the parasitic
sickness is shown to be a symptom of a larger cultural, and
decidedly corporate, epidemic: ‘THIS— IS —
AN — INDUSTRY— LØVING/
YØUR MØM’ (emphasis added).
Nippon ends by showing that the effects of global
corporate capitalism are not limited to the confines of the
after-hours bar but are evident in the daytime when the
streets are filled with ‘TØØ MANY MEN IN
DARK-GREY SUITS/ HURRY TØ TAXIS,/ AND
LØØK HØW MANY— HAVE —CHAUFFERS’.
Nippon exposes a situation in which ‘TØØ
MANY MEN’, too uniformly dressed, and possessing too
much money spill out of bars and brothels and into a morning
light laden with ennui and isolation. The various
industries involved in producing this cultural effect –
including the authors, who identify their artistic
collaboration as “Heavy Industries”[8]
– are indicted in the judgment which Nippon’s
first and last lines reiterate: ‘IT’S
WRØNG.’ Yet, as Nippon’s last line
continues, such conclusions are never so black and white (or
red and white): ‘IT’S — WRØNG, —
ALL WRØNG. — AND — YET IT’S/ ALL
SØ RIGHT.’
The cultural situation that Nippon depicts is
neither ‘wrong’ nor ‘right’, but
rather in need of interpretation – and, indeed, of
translation – on the part of the reader. Consider, for
example, when the narrative slips into the interior
consciousness of the characters: ‘ØUR —
HØST' shared 'HIS —DEEPEST —
THØUGHTS —ØN — LIFE – —HIS
—LIFE, — WHICH RESEMBLE A —LIVE, — UNCUT —ADAPTATION
— ØF AN ØLD BLUE/ EYES’ FAVØRITE.’
Whether the man’s ‘DEEPEST —
THØUGHTS’ were actually so shallow as to
resemble a sentimental Sinatra song or it is the narrator
who is constrained to such descriptions, the presence of Old
Blue Eyes in the inner-thoughts of the narrator and/or the
host attests to the infiltration of American culture into
the deepest reaches of Japanese consciousness. This is not
the only hint registering the effects of Western cultural
colonization on the Japanese subject. The narrator assesses
the scene at the bar and notices a set of interesting
discrepancies: ‘THE LIPSTICK, —PEARLY—
PINK,— SHØULD— BE—
BLØØD—RED’ and ‘THE—
WHITE— LIGHT/SHØULD BE — YELLØW,—
A— SLEEPY—YELLØW – —
NØT— HARSH— FLØURESCENT.’
The observations are those of a director preparing for a
cinematic scene, and they express the narrator’s
possession of a set of preconceived notions, informed by
mass media, of what the moment should look and feel like.
While such moments might seem to represent a homogenization
of cultural influences, Nippon complicates this
conclusion in its onscreen performance. The split screen,
speeding interaction between English and Japanese renders
the languages and the cultural powers they represent engaged
in a collaborative performance that produces the digital
work and its interpretation of a situation that is both ‘wrong’
and ‘right’.
Reading the subtext of Nippon’s narrative, as
I am doing, is an act of interpretative translation (the
second definition of ‘to translate’ in the
OED); and, it is a reading strategy that
Nippon encourages. Following Nippon and
reading it in this manner means developing a heightened
awareness that interpretation is always caught up in
translation. To see how YHCHI make visible and aesthetic the
central role that interpretation plays in translation –
that central aspect of digital computing – consider
the following screen capture:
Figure
2: Screenshot from Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’s
Nippon
The
text pauses long enough for the reader to notice a
difference across the dividing line: the Japanese sentence
ends with a question mark while the English concludes with a
period. The typographic dissonance illuminates the fact that
even though the languages tell the same story, the specific
linguistic and textual forms in which those stories are told
matters. Differences in semantic word order produce
differences in textual narrative and, thus, differences in
interpretation. This fact has always proven a challenge for
translators, but it is exacerbated by the distinctions
between alphanumeric and ideogrammic text and their
individual relationships to digitization.[9]
From Saussure’s (1960 [1916]) focus on
alphanumeric over ideogrammic languages to contemporary
efforts to encode Chinese into computing languages built
upon the foundations of alphanumeric linguistics, the
dissimilarities between these language systems has proven a
decisive challenge for translation and
interpretation.[10]
It is not within the scope of this paper to elaborate on
this issue, but this cultural and conceptual history is
crucial to discussions of computer code, machinic
translation, and universal language.[11]
Nippon represents the central challenge of
translating between and digitizing across alphanumeric and
ideogrammic languages in its central design element –
the dividing line at the center of the screen. This visual
detail both juxtaposes and separates the languages as it
also stimulates and stymies translation between
them.
4.
Reading across the Line
The presentation of English and Japanese in contrasting
colors flashing on opposite sides of a horizontal line
produces an optical illusion similar to the anamorphic
effect that Rita Raley identifies as essential to electronic
literature. In ‘Reveal Codes: Hypertext and
Performance’, Raley (2001) argues that what
differentiates electronic literature from print literature
is a procedural performance in which one element is
necessarily lost in the process of producing another. To
illustrate her point, Raley compares the experience of
reading Jasper Johns’s painting Flags (1965),
which produces an anamorphic optical illusion in which ‘one
flag is marked only by losing the other’
[n.p], to electronic hypertext. Electronic
literature, she argues, operates through ‘an-anamorphosis
– the digitized version of anamorphosis – [which]
paradoxically references the anamorphic but flattens out its
volume’ [n.p]. Nippon is not a
hypertext; its narrative structure is not comprised of
multiple reading paths or a navigation system for
maneuvering through them. It is, in some ways, the opposite
of hypertext; it is a single Flash file that contains no
options for reader-controlled navigation, no buttons to
pause, slow, or stop the animation. Yet, Raley’s
description of an-anamorphosis is both applicable and
instructive for reading Nippon. In a hypertext, one
lexia replaces another in the production of its
an-anamorphic effect; in Nippon a word or phrase
supplants another. However, both hypertext and YHCHI’s
Flash-ing animations highlight the elements lost or replaced
in the performance of the digital work. Raley writes that ‘[t]he
operative difference of hypertext’ [n.p] which
differentiates Johns’s analog anamorphosis from
digital an-anamorphosis, ‘can only be revealed in the
performing and tracing of itself, in its own
instantiation’ (emphasis added [n.p]).
Nippon animates Raley’s insight in a
performance that not only gestures to the ‘trace’,
as Raley, invoking Derrida, calls it, but includes this
trace and the ‘tracing of itself’ as part of its
aesthetic. Nippon calls upon the reader to trace
its onscreen performance and the reflexive commentary it
presents about the translation of its text from digital
code. Such a reading process means moving between the
digital work’s translation of code into text and the
reader’s heightened awareness that reading digital
literature requires multiple acts of translation.
Nippon encourages its reader to approach the work
by reading across and through the dividing line it depicts
and illuminates: both the visible line separating the
languages onscreen and also the metaphorical line dividing
onscreen text from hidden, programmable code. This
pedagogical exercise begins with Nippon’s
first line. The opposition between right and wrong that
opens (‘IT’S — WRØNG’) and
concludes (‘IT’S — WRØNG, —
ALL WRØNG. — AND — YET IT’S/ ALL
SØ RIGHT’) Nippon’s narrative
identifies the work as revolving around the presentation and
deconstruction of binaries. The conceptual dichotomies of
English/Japanese, red/white, East/West, work/leisure,
male/female, commerce/sex, ideogrammic/alphanumeric,
code/language are displayed onscreen. Nippon
displays these binaries in order to perform an aesthetic act
of deconstruction that complicates their divisions and shows
their relationships to be symbiotic rather than
oppositional. It thus creates a context in which readers
learn to read across binaries in order to deconstruct them.
The dividing line separating English and Japanese emphasizes
this goal, but it also reflexively alludes to the role of
the screen itself as a dividing interface between apparently
oppositional entities: the invisible, executable programming
code and the resulting, screenic text. However, just as
Nippon shows English and Japanese operating in a
symbiotic rather than an oppositional relationship, so too
does it expose a similar relationship between code and text.
As Nippon continues into its lengthy performance of
fast, flashing text, this deconstruction is made manifest
not only visually but also affectively. The reader’s
tired eyes experience an aesthetic illustration of the
Derridean trace through a performance of (an-)anamorphosis:
the boundary line separating English and Japanese begins to
blur. The interaction between and across the languages bears
itself out on the reader’s body and, in particular, on
her dry, unblinking eyes. The experience supports Mark B.N.
Hansen’s (2004) claim that the human body is the
interface for digital information: ‘the body now
operates by filtering information directly and,
though this process, creating images’ (11,
original emphasis). Hansen describes the digital image as
having ‘become a process and, as such, [it]
has become irreducibly bound up with the activity of the
body’ (10). This bond between the digital image and
the human body is felt by Nippon’s reader,
who struggles to physically engage with the processural
nature of the flashing an-anamorphosis. Like too many
reproductions made from an analog image, Nippon’s
reader experiences a physical and embodied sense of loss:
loss of energy, focus, and ability to read across the
narrative registers. The effect (and, indeed, the affect)
reminds the reader how digital code and its translation are
always embodied in and negotiated by their relation to human
beings, their bodies, and the embodied contexts in which
they exist.
The context for Nippon’s argument about the
relationship between code and text also extends to the role
that this particular work plays in YHCHI’s œuvre.
A quick glance at YHCHI’s website exposes a table of
contents which displays the duo’s interest in language
and translation. Most of the works are available in multiple
languages: English, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French, and
Dutch. Instead of offering one data file with a button to “translate”
the text into another language, however, YHCHI provide
separate files and links for each language version (see
Figure 3 below).
Figure
3: Screenshot from www.ychang.com [Accessed 26 March
2007]
Instead
of machinic translation, then, YHCHI offer different
versions of the same work, each coded to perform differently
depending on the language in which they appear. This fact
illustrates YHCHI’s commitment to displaying
translation as a context-driven act dependent upon its
linguistic system. For example, Dakota is available
in four languages – English, Spanish, Korean, and
Portuguese – and each of the four links activate a
different version of the work by opening a different Flash
file.[12]
YHCHI
are acutely aware of the intricacies of translation and
their effort to represent these challenges. Despite the
option to view YHCHI’s works in a variety of
languages, as of this writing (March 2007), Nippon
is one of the only works on YHCHI’s site that is
available in only one version. Nippon is also the
only work in YHCHI’s œuvre that contains
two languages interacting across a split-screen. There are a
few other works that display two languages onscreen
simultaneously, English paired with either Japanese or
Korean, but the interaction between the languages produces a
distinctly different aesthetic result than Nippon.
For example, in Bust Down the Doors Again! English
is the main text, and it is displayed in a font larger than
the accompanying Korean; English is also centered on the
screen while the Korean appears in the guise of a
subtitle.[13]
Aomori Amori is an interesting exception, for it
uses a combination of English and Japanese displayed
onscreen in equal sizes; but in this piece, the languages
appear together without a dividing visual line or
oppositional colors to demarcate their juxtaposition or
establish a relationship of binary interaction. Only
Nippon uses two languages onscreen to construct an
encounter that is not just about dual languages but, in some
ways, about dueling languages. The presentation of these
languages in this particular work in YHCHI’s œuvre
prompts readers to recognize Nippon’s agenda:
to illuminate the fact that something is always lost in
translation, even when that translation happens on a
computer. It also encourages us to approach electronic
literature with attentiveness to the processes of
translation and compilation which both enable and affect our
reading of it.
5.
Conclusion: Translation and/as Transcoding
YHCHI call attention to how we read and discuss code by
making visible the fact that reading code – by human
and computer readers – is always an act of
translation. Media critic Lev Manovich (2001) defines new
media as a process of translation: ‘the translation of
all existing media into numerical data accessible through
computers. The result is new media' (20). Manovich
identifies “transcoding” as one of the four
tenets and trends he uses to define “new media”,
and he describes it as the translation of media between
formats. But transcoding is not limited to media formats; it
is not a one-way road that stops at the level of binary code
or the perimeters of computing technology. Instead, as
Manovich argues, transcoding is a bi-directional
relationship between the computer and the cultural layer, a
process whose effects are evident not only within the
computer but also in the culture at large. In other words,
the translation of information into digital code not only
alters the text at hand but also affects the culture reading
it. As Manovich writes, ‘The computerization of
culture gradually accomplishes similar transcoding in
relation to all cultural categories and concepts’
(47). The distinction between the computer layer and the
cultural layer, like that between code and text, is not only
permeable but inseparable.
The concept of transcoding is central to reading electronic
literature because it promotes investigation into the
relationship between form, content, and code while also
encouraging examination into how these aesthetic and
technical aspects affect the relationship between the
computer-based work and the culture in which it circulates.
As I have been arguing, Nippon provides a clear
case study for such a reading practice. It is a work that
engages with its own materiality and processural performance
by focusing on how text and translation are processed within
the computer layer – both on and beneath the screen –
and also in relation to human beings and their cultural
contexts. Its narrative is very much about the desires and
conflicts of physical and social bodies, and its aesthetic
produces a discernible affect on the reader’s own
body. It also operates in a specific context in YHCHI’s
body of work. In this way Nippon strives to
reference and represent the cultural and political contexts
engaged in its acts of translation. It presents a
performance of transcoding that makes visible and aesthetic
the larger cultural, political, and critical contexts in
which its machinic processes operate.
When John Cayley (2002) titled his essay on codework ‘The
Code is not the Text (Unless it is the Text)’, the
digital poet and critic articulated a demand for a focus on
onscreen text and its aesthetics. Nippon supports
Cayley’s argument and expands upon it. We need not
view the separation between text and code as an impenetrable
wall but, instead, should look for traces of their
intertwined relationship. Nippon provides an
opportunity for such critical practices. Its depiction of
the interaction between onscreen languages serves as both a
metaphor and a materialization of the interaction between
languages happening beneath the screen. It stages a scene of
translation onscreen in order to promote a reading practice
that moves between human languages in order to stimulate
recognition that reading digital text cannot be limited to
one language or one textual output but must examine the acts
of translation between them. Nippon thus depicts an
aesthetic exchange between machine and human translation as
a means of challenging the ways in which we think, write,
and talk about the relationship between code and text. We
cannot read Nippon’s code, but we can read
the code between the words. Doing so opens our readings
beyond binaries of text and code to investigations of the
larger contexts and constellations in which humans and
machines communicate across and through acts of translation.
Note: I would like to thank
Melissa Sodeman for her helpful suggestions on this essay.
All screenshots from Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’s
works and website are used with permission, and I thank the
artists for their generosity.
Notes
1.
Interest in reading code as cultural object
and linguist text is evident in the forthcoming series
announced by MIT Press titled Platform Studies, edited by
Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort. For more details, see
http://platformstudies.com
[cited 27 March 2007].
2.
Codework is the genre of electronic literature
that has propelled critical discussions about reading
computer code as part of literary analysis, including in the
above citations from writings by John Cayley (2002). Rita
Raley (2002) describes 'codework' as a literary genre that
engages with the binary between interface and programming
code in order to 'to move beyond this schism' [n.p].
In the following essay, I will try to show that the goals
Raley identifies as constitutive of codework are not limited
to that genre and neither should Raley’s astute method
of literary analysis.
3.
In Of Grammatology, Derrida describes
the Western philosophical project of viewing 'Chinese script
[as] a model of the philosophical language thus
removed from history' (1998: 76) – i.e. as a
universal language – as a 'European hallucination':
'The concept of Chinese writing thus functioned as a sort of
European hallucination' (80).
4.
In this essay, Raley describes the genre of
codework as one which 'refers to the use of contemporary
idiolect of the computer and computing processes in digital
media experimental writing' [n.p.] and whose
'general result is a text-object or text-event that
emphasizes its own programming, mechanism, and materiality'
[n.p.]. She provides a critical context for reading
codework within a tradition of experimental literary
writing.
5.
As some critics have persuasively argued, the
computer’s ability to execute said operations does not
mean that the machine understands either the languages or
the process of translation. For a forceful, creative, and
relevant critique, consider John Searle’s Chinese Room
experiment. In 'Minds, Brains and Programs' (1980), Searle
puts forth a challenge of the Turing Test by altering the
situation of the test to present the idea of computer
program that processes Chinese without understanding the
content of the text being processed.
6.
The quote continues by stating that such a
view of translation ‘has come under critique by
theorists such as Lawrence Venuti, Gayatri Spivack, and
Lydia Liu’ (293). The second quote presents Raley’s
investigation into how a system of universal translation
founded upon a dominant language paradigm – English,
or “Global English” – ascribes to the
system of translation an ideological imbalance, i.e., that
of Western culture (300).
7.
Of course it is impossible to describe and
transcribe Nippon into print. For the sake of
differentiating between consecutively flashing screens and
line-breaks contained on a single screen, I use the
conventional backslash (/) to denote a line-break and thick
dashes (—) to designate movement, in this case the
flashing replacement of text on screen. Also, throughout
Dakota, YHCHI use Monaco font and substitute the
zero sign for the capital “O”; I follow them on
the latter.
8.
Young-hae Chang is the name of one of the
artists; the other is Mark Voge. In an interview with
Hyun-Joo Yoo for dichtung-digital (2005), the duo
responds to a question about their title in typical
tongue-in-cheek manner: ‘It's pretty evident. YHC for
Young-Hae and HI for Marc. We changed Marc into "HEAVY
INDUSTRIES", because Koreans love big companies and Marc
doesn't mind being objectified and capitalized on’
[n.p].
9.
Encoding Chinese characters to digital code is
difficult due to the sheer number of characters (Chinese
contains more than 71,000 characters and over 4,000
syllables in standard Chinese pronunciation) as well as the
numerous possible phonetic effects that alter meaning. The
scale of transcription poses a stark contrast and challenge
to the limited character set of the English alphabet, upon
which digital programming is based. The vast number of
characters obviously cannot fit in the 256-character code
space of English-based 8-bit encodings. The first code for
networked computing technology was American Standard Code
for Information Interchange (ASCII), adopted in 1968, which
represented English characters as numbers by assigning each
letter a number from 0 to 128. As ASCII was based on
English, it fell short of being able to translate such
languages as Arabic, with its multiple vowels and
diacritical signs, and, of course, Chinese. Projects to
rectify this situation include Unicode, which uses 16 bits
for each character instead of ASCII’s 7 bits and can
thus over 65,000 unique characters. Unicode is produced by
The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization founded in
1991, and its motto is ‘Unicode provides a unique
number for every character, no matter what the platform, no
matter what the program, no matter what the language’.
[online] Available from: www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html
[cited March 2007]. But, as critics ranging from
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to Joe Lockard point out, the
situation is not so much a problem to be solved technically
as an ideological challenge in need of appropriate critique.
10.
In Course in General Linguistics
(1960 [1916]), Ferdinand de Saussure explains that
there are two types of writing systems, ideographic and
phonetic, and that his linguistic theory would ‘limit
discussion to the phonetic system, and especially to the one
used today, the system that stems from the Greek alphabet’
(26).
11.
I write in more depth about the relationship
between alphanumeric and ideogrammic text in relation to
computer code in my dissertation, Digital Modernism:
Making it New in New Media. In particular, see Chapter
Three, 'Lost in Translation: Computer Code, Chinese, and the
"Hallucination" of Universal Language in Cyberspace' wherein
I present the nexus between these language systems as a
place for examining the development of the ambition to
enable universal language through the computer.
12.
YHCHI often add new languages versions of
their work. The four languages listed above were available
on the website (www.yhchang.com)
as of March 6, 2007.
13.
There is also no dividing line splitting the
screen into equal portions or opposing colors for
interaction between and across the languages. Traveling
to Utopia also uses English and Korean, but again,
English is the central and centered language.
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