Listening To: Deaf, Dumb & Blind : Clawfinger

Back in ’99 as part of one of my post-grad subjects … Hypertext Authoring I think it was, I created a Rhizome using a bunch of emails from a friend of mine, and some shareware translation software. At the time, I think the original text was translated from English to Swedish, Swedish to German, German to French, French to Italian, and Italian back to the English in a sort of semantic Chinese Whispers. The resulting garble was then edited to resemble something at least approximating sense. These text blocks were then assembled as a series of independent HTML pages, and a pretty f*cked up navigation system constructed in an attempt at non-linearity (within the contstraints of HTML).

I was pretty happy with the result, and earned a HD mark for the project, and the subject as a whole. Sitting around with a bit of spare time on my hands today, I thought it would be fun to revisit the process … hence the new blog, Tales of Idoru – which you’ll also find a link to on my side-bar. I’ll be updating this on a semi regular basis, because I must confess the process still fascinates me. This time round my ‘raw material’ (input) are blog entries – mine, or other peoples. I’m using a slightly different software tool for the machine-side translations, and a lot fewer steps – only English to Japanese & back again this time. Nonetheless, this actually produces a more f*cked up ‘raw output’ than using 5 translations did previously – its probably something to do with the fundamental clash between the linguistic structures of Japanese & English ! After that, once again comes the edit stage where I try to make at least *some* semblence of meaning (or sentence structure) out of the babble.

Check out the results, and tell me what you think. Personally, I love the ‘flavour’ the Japanese translation step seems to impart to it … to me, a lot of the phrases seem to come out like a weird pseudo-haiku.

Incidentally, this is where the reference to ‘Idoru’ comes in. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an Idoru is one of those strange Japanese memes … an ‘artificial’ / machine-created (pop) idol … kind of like a ‘vactor’ or ‘synthespian’. I think the Japanese actually have a few prototype Idoru around … I remember reading an article a few years back about someone called “Yuki” I think, who was / is a pseudo-manga ‘Pop Star’ voiced by an unknown female singer, and who only ‘appears’ in her digitised representation. Idoru is machine-made cultural artefact. There’s a William Gibson reference in there too, peoples ;P

The other thing I love about my Idoru blog (and I think you’ll agree with me here) is that this time round – Idoru is smutty ! *s* The original texts I’m using aren’t all that risque in themselves … but in between the machine-translations and my editing, even if you can’t make much other sense out of the results, it comes across sounding like theres more phreaky nastiness going on than we started with before the machine stepped in !

Enjoy, grooveriders … and expect a real post *here* tommorrow …. or maybe the day after …