HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks

Translation Map (world) screenshot, February 7, 2003
Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks
http://translationmap.walkerart.org

Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks

Sawad Brooks b.1964 (Colombia)
lives and works in Williamsburg, New York
Warren Sack b.1962 (Minnesota)
lives and works in Santa Cruz, California

http://translationmap.walkerart.org

Before joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, Film & Digital Media Department, Warren Sack was an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, a research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory, and a research collaborator in the Interrogative Design Group at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He earned a B.A. from Yale College and an S.M. and Ph.D.from the MIT Media Laboratory. His work concerns theories and designs for online public space and public discussion.

Earlier work by Sack includes "Conversation Map: A Content-Based Usenet Newsgroup Browser."
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~sack/CM/
http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/IUI/Sack/Sack.html

Sawad Brooks is an internationally shown artist, critic, and award winning designer working with public and information spaces. DissemiNET (1998-2001), one of his collaborations with Beth Stryker, is a telematic installation commissioned in part by the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University. DissemiNET has been shown internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and is part of the Walker Art Center's Digital Arts Study Collection, as is Brooks' Bowling Alley (1995), a collaboration with Beth Stryker, Christa Erickson, and Shu Lea Cheang. Invertigo (1997), a telematic video installation created in collaboration with Beth Stryker and Christa Erickson, was shown at The Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada. Sawad's work has also been shown at such places as the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Johannesburg Biennale; and Postmasters Gallery, New York. He has been invited to speak at numerous locations, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He is currently working with Warren Sack on "hELLO7734," a new network protocol art-research project that interrogates "translation," funded in part by the Arts Technology Center, University of New Mexico, with grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the NEA. This project has also received support through a Jerome Grant from the Walker Art Center, and will be included in its show, How Latitudes Become Forms. With Goil Amornvivat and generous support from Creative Capital, he is also working on a a system of responsive architecture. Independently, he is working on a series of interactive videos addressing the themes of landscape, public space, and time, as well as preparing an article for publication, dealing with algorithms, representation, and new media. He teaches at Brown University's department of Modern Culture and Media.

Translation Map
Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks

2003
http://translationmap.walkerart.org

Translation Map by Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks tackles two very different but oddly related problems. As they write:

"While there is great hope that the Internet will one day truly be worldwide, mutual understanding and worldwide communication cannot be accomplished simply by running fiber optic cable across international borders. Right now on the net, discussion is dominated by the English language. If we hope to include most of the Earth's population in a global conversation the means will need to be found to connect people across languages and cultures."

Functionally, Translation Map is a multi-protocol message delivery system. It allows someone to write a message and have it delivered anywhere--such as my great uncle in Poland, whom I haven't seen in 20 years--in any language.

The anywhere part is based on Stanley Millgram's famous 6 degrees of separation experiment, in which a package with only a name and a vague location was given to someone in Nebraska and usually within 6 "hops" it arrived at its intended recipient. Similarly, Translation Map will use a combination of network resources: a language database to identify where a language is spoken; a world facts database to automatically generate contextual information that can help refine choices; a GIS database to identify major cities in the regions identified by language, and a database of net communities in cities around the world. Simple right?

The translation part is a bit more complicated, but also interesting in terms of computing theory.

"Our . . . approach is based on the following observation made most acutely by the sociologist of science and technology, Bruno Latour: "The word translation has at least two meanings: one linguistic, the other geometric." The meaning of "translation" in the discipline of geometry means a movement from one position to another. Rather than as a problem of linguistics and text, we propose to examine language translation as a problem of border crossing, movement, and spatialization.

Sack and Brooks believe that, essentially, the problem of computer-based translation has been misunderstood for than 50 years:

"In 1949 one of the inventors of the mathematical theory of information and communication, Warren Weaver, wrote and distributed a report to two hundred of his colleagues. The title of Weaver's report was "Translation." Its purpose was to explore the idea that one might design a computer program to translate texts from one language to another. Those familiar with Claude Shannon's and Warren Weaver's mathematical theory of information and communication will not find the following too surprising. But, anyone who has done the work of a translator is likely to find Weaver's understanding of translation fantastical:

"When I look at an article in Russian, I say, 'This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode'."

They continue:

"After half a century of sustained work on Weaver's translation-as-decoding problem, how much progress has been made? When measured against the enormous amount of money that has been spent on computer programs written to "decrypt" novels, newspapers, technical reports and other sorts of texts, has the small amount of progress achieved been worth the budgets--indeed careers--expended? Perhaps, fifty years later, it's finally time to admit Weaver's folly: translation is not a task of decryption. In fact, it may be time to critically examine many of the so-called "fixes" of computer science with the same sort of skepticism Ludwig Wittgenstein applied in his examination of the "problems" of philosophy (Wittgenstein, 1951). Many of the "problems" of natural language processing may stem from a badly chosen set of foundational propositions (e.g., translation-as-decryption) and might, therefore, be more properly understood as pseudo problems or just silly games."

While Translation Map is presented, in part, as a research agenda, it is also pointedly interested in the social underpinnings for the work and its aesthetic output. It is focusing on connections, a kind of social resonance of the networks, not necessarily as an instrumentalized end product or patentable algorithm.

Initiatives, Alternatives: Notes in a Temporary and Raw State
Hou Hanru

omnipresent network, in a shifting in-between space that thrives on the hybridity and conflicts of cultures and identities.[2] But, this choice should be capable of carrying out efficient strategies of critique, resistance, and transgression against the hegemonic power of the Empire. Unfortunately, the mainstream "global art world," namely, the dominant art institutions, remain in the high-modernist tradition of the white cube and post-minimalist, post-conceptualist forms. This "transcendent" physicality constitutes a hegemonic ideology and practice paradigm. This centralized power controls the definition, the boundary, of contemporary art and propagates it across the world as if it were the "universal truth," the only legitimated way, of "global" art.

5. Against such a background, resistance to this hegemony becomes necessary and urgent, especially in places where new local identities are facing the pressure of globalizing powers. This resistance naturally generates and articulates new forms of action and organization fundamentally different from those of the establishment. In fact, a great number of initiatives already have been launched and promoted, and they strongly emphasize the philosophy of "Do-It-Yourself." Indeed, DIY communities and self-organizations are the main source of sustainability, the main force in the revival and continued development of today's post-planning cities. The creation and development of alternative art spaces is a perfect example. Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones shifts constantly between the existing center and the periphery, creating a kind of "emptiness" that subverts the established order.[3] This approach resonates with the current global economic system, which is moving toward a new perspective that focuses on productivity rather than the production of objects. Driven by the development of new technologies, conventional modes of production and consumption have been altered and substituted by new paradigms. In different locales around the world, new autonomous zones of economic activities are being established that resist and at the same time contribute to the globalization of dominant modes of production. These zones become an oppositional yet actively participatory force against the domination of state and global economic superpowers. Self-organizations such as international NGOs are now counterparts to the established bureaucratic order, in which transnational and global corporations push for the disintegration of national and continental borders and for the dissolution of state sovereignty. Under the imperial mantle of the new global economic-political power structure, the immediate challenge is how to preserve freedom of speech, encourage critique, and promote different modes of living and thinking. This economic and political transformation has a direct cultural consequence: it reveals the necessity of searching for and creating alternatives to the established cultural institution. To promote cultural difference and hybridity in contemporary art, one must first and foremost consider the need to create alternative contexts, namely institutions, for art activity.

6. Asia-Pacific provides a dynamic example of this transition in terms of integrating itself in the globalization process and reinventing different modernities. The unprecedented speed of modernization and democratization of society in this region has led to self-discovery and to a search for autonomous modes of living, thinking, and expression that stand in contrast to conservative and hegemonic political systems and social values. There are enthusiastic and fervent demands to put contemporary art from this region on the global map. This is achieved through two intimately linked directives: the creation of new infrastructures and conditions inside the region for the activities, and the exportation of these activities outside the region, especially in renowned "international arenas" such as major biennials and museums. This encourages the artists living in the region to develop new strategies, the most significant tendency being the creation and propagation of

2 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

3 See Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, anti-copyright 1985, 1991); also available online at . According to Bey, TAZ is "a certain kind of 'free enclave'" resisting against the mainstream, state power structure. It is "an essay ('attempt'), a suggestion, almost a poetic fancy" that encourages "uprising," or "insurrection," against the state power. It's situated beyond all manner of established forms of organization: "The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it." It is invisible, always shifting, "a microcosm of that 'anarchist dream' of a free culture." "The TAZ is an encampment of guerrilla ontologists: strike and run away." It has a "temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but actual location in space. But clearly it must also have 'location' in the Web.…" In the end, "The TAZ is somewhere. It lies at the intersection of many forces, like some pagan power-spot at the junction of mysterious ley-lines, visible to the adept in seemingly unrelated bits of terrain, landscape, flows of air, water, animals." It can bring about ultimate liberation "on the condition that we already know ourselves as free beings."

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

new practices. Nevertheless, as important and reassuring as the notion of thirdness and in-betweenness is, it might only be the third step on the way to change. It is not sufficient merely to acknowledge the notion of thirdness; one needs to make it active, to pull it toward an alternative center. If not, thirdness might become a definition that restrains and limits new knowledge rather than one that empowers it.[28]

For Atelier Bow-Wow and Can Altay, the starting point for their respective projects involves inventory and documentation. This impetus to record one's own environment is apparent in many artistic practices today, most obviously in the practice of film, but not exclusively. The logic of the documentary has increasingly emerged in the visual arts over the last decade, as demonstrated by the incorporation of moving images into art practices, using models borrowed from popular culture and entertainment, including Hollywood movies, music videos, and video games.

The exigency of information and realism reveals itself in Chinese artist Wang Jian Wei's film Living Elsewhere (1999-2000; pp. 245-247). The film, which documents a failed real-estate development project in the suburbs of Beijing, seems motivated by the need to record a socioeconomical and cultural mutation. The same drive applies to Zhao Liang's film Bored Youth (2000; pp. 253-255), which focuses on Beijing's predatory urban development, even though the pure documentary language is mixed with editing strategies inherited from music videos. In both cases, documentary filmmaking becomes a means for sustaining a tradition that has almost disappeared from art practice: the tradition of storytelling.

Although she does not use moving images as a medium, Yin Xiuzhen participates in this strategy when she documents--through installations or interventions--the way in which memory vanishes with the destruction or dislocation of communities (pp. 249-251). Such artists seem to embrace a sense of civic responsibility that redefines activism as a quiet subversion rather than a frontal and oppositional attack. The powerful body of work that has erupted under this logic of documentary has also allowed the practitioners to reassert their own proximity and to locate their practices, and the consequences thereof, on a very local or regional level. Again, this movement can be seen as an effect of a widely globalized culture. Here, the urgency is to find a way to make a difference. The local is becoming the alternative, and it contributes to a redefinition of the nature of the audience through the involvement of communities.

The paradox of the increasingly globalized world is that many artists are attempting to reinvent, or to establish, their difference. This movement, which might be the unavoidable flip side of globalization, was the cornerstone of the Gwangju Biennale in 2002.[29] One outstanding feature of this exhibition was the presence of twenty-six collectives or independent organizations from Europe and Asia. These groups have emerged over the last decade as fundamental protagonists in art-making and diffusion, developing alternative strategies that affect the relationship of art to the larger world. These groups/platforms, all active in their communities as exhibition venues, educational structures, or production units, serve as a metaphor for a new arena of negotiation that lies in between the global and the local.[30]

In many ways, the projects of Kaoru Arima, developed through his Art Drug Center in Inuyama-City, Japan, echo such concerns. In his own house, Arima opened an art center to provide a platform for fellow artists who might not otherwise find venues for showing their work. With a similar attention to the value of proximity, the New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, composed of filmmakers and new-media practitioners, is working on a series of initiatives motivated by the desire to interpret, understand, and engage the urban construct of the city in which they live and work. One of their projects is based on the creation of a "cyber neighborhood," acenter for digital intervention with kids in a working-class settlement in New Delhi.

28 On this topic see Leslie A. Adelson, "Against Between: A Manifesto," in Unpacking Europe, eds. Hassan and Dadi, p. 245.

29 The 2002 Gwangju Biennale, titled Pause, was co-curated by Charles Esche, director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden,and Hou Hanru, freelance curator, director of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, and member of the Walker Art Center's global advisory committee.

30 For more on this topic, see Hou Hanru's essay on page 36 in this book.

Just How Did Latitudes Become Forms?
Aimee Chang, Douglas Fogle, Olukemi Ilesanmi, Philippe Vergne

galleries. The multidisciplinary agenda that we have is reflected in the practice of some of the artists, but not systematically.

Something very interesting and new about the way we're working is how this coming together of departments at the Walker is formalized in the publication. It might be one of the first times that everything--the exhibition, the film program, the performing art program, and the educational curriculum--has a voice in the catalogue.

This crossover is embedded in my own researches. Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed[11] and Oiticica's philosophies were equally important touchstones for me as a curator of the exhibition. They are both helping me to reconsider the word "popular."

OI: Working across departments is something that we have been moving toward through exhibitions such as Art Performs Life, Let's Entertain, and American Tableaux. An important part of the institution's vision has to do with making connections cross-departmentally so that our audiences for film, for example, are not completely separate from our audiences for visual arts. If we make those connections inside the building then people outside the building can also make those connections. It was exciting, sometimes confusing, but mostly informative and thought-provoking to be at the table with all of the other departments and with our advisory committee and to make links--conceptually, thematically, and art historically--in the work we all do. The underlying goal of this initiative is about making fundamental changes that will help us formulate more expansive ideas and programming in the future.

PV: To wrap things up I'd like to read this statement by Raymond Williams, which I find helpful in understanding the goal of such an institutional initiative:

The innovations of what is called Modernism have become the new but fixed forms of our present moment. If we have to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism, then we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition that may address itself not to this by now exploitable because inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again.[12]

This question of communities is central to our efforts. What communities are we talking about and to? How do we address them and why? How are they affected by and how are they affecting art practices, institutional practices? The real challenge that we are facing as curators and museum workers is how to unfold an "alternative" within the social constructs of cultural institutions.

11 Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: The Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1983).

12 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), p. 35; quoted in Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000), p. 297.

Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks

To promote cultural difference and hybridity in contemporary art, one must first and foremost consider the need to create alternative contexts, namely institutions, for art activity.

The local is becoming the alternative, and it contributes to a redefinition of the nature of the audience through the involvement of communities.

The real challenge that we are facing as curators and museum workers is how to unfold an "alternative" within the social constructs of cultural institutions.