Christine Sun Kim
Christine Sun Kim is an American sound artist based in Berlin. Working predominantly in drawing, performance, and video, Kim's practice considers how sound operates in society. Musical notation, written language, American Sign Language, and the use of the body are all recurring elements in her work. What interests me about her practice is that it lies between things, she mediates languages so that they touch upon each other and as they do so an element of translation is needed. My interest in Markov Blankets was also heightened, because in order for her to work in the way she does, she has to on the one hand be flexible and recognise the needs of different disciplines, their interdependency and how they effect each other and yet on the other hand still give each format the necessary structural integrity to ensure that it operates independently as a drawing, a video or a performance. As more and more art practitioners are working in a mixed or cross disciplinary manner, it would seem an opportune moment to reflect upon how this approach reflects on some wider, more philosophical issues surrounding the nature of art and life itself.
Christine Sun Kim
If you are a musician you will be very used to translating the feeling tone of music into words. Music is meant to affect us in deeply emotional ways and Christian Schubart believed that he could define these very precisely. Below are the affective key characteristics as detailed in Christian Schubart's 'Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst' (Ideas for an aesthetic of the art of music)
C major: Completely Pure. Associations of innocence, simplicity, naïvety, children's talk.
C minor: A declaration of love and the sighing of the love-sick soul.
Db major: A leering key, degenerating into grief and rapture. It cannot laugh, it smiles.
D major: The key of triumph, of Halleluiahs, war-cries and of victory.
D minor: Melancholy womanliness, the spleen and humours brood.
D# minor: The anxiety of the soul. When spectres speak, their speech is in this key.
Eb major: The key of love, of devotion and of intimate conversation with God.
E major: Shouts of joy, laughing and fulfilled delight.
F major: Complaisance & calm.
F minor: Deep depression, funereal lament, groans of misery and longing for the grave.
F# major: Triumph over difficulty, echo of a soul which has fiercely struggled and won.
F# minor: A gloomy key: it tugs at passion as a dog biting a dress.
G major: Rustic, idyllic and lyrical, every calm and satisfied passion.
G minor: Discontent, uneasiness and bad-tempered gnashing of teeth.
Ab major: Key of the grave. Death, grave, putrefaction and eternity lie in its radius.
Ab minor: Grumbler, suffocating heart, wailing lament and all difficult struggles.
A major: Innocent love, hope of seeing one's beloved again and trust in God.
A minor: Pious womanliness and tenderness of character.
Bb major: Cheerful love, clear conscience, hope and aspiration for a better world.
Bb minor: Mocking God and the world; preparation for suicide sounds in this key.
B major: Anger, rage, jealousy, fury, despair and every burden of the heart.
B minor: The key of patience, of calm submission to divine dispensation.
Nature is to Schubart not just untranslatable but dumb. This is a timely reminder for myself as well, in particular as I am struggling to find a visual language that could possibly be used to communicate aspects of interoception or inner body awareness to other humans and yet at the same time often forgetting that over 50% of a human's inner body mass is composed of bacteria. Schubart's focus on an exclusively 'human' world, is one that Lynn Margulis in her book 'Symbiotic Planet' would no doubt point out is literally a 'dead-end'. Those chirping martins, she would suggest, if we could translate their songs, will soon be crooning, 'Got along without out before I met you, gonna get along without you now'.
You might by now have lost my thread, my rambling thoughts on translation are I suppose about who or what translates what and to what effect. Translation is first of all about taking an interest in something you don't understand. Gradually you seek to put something into your own language. But that language is not just a verbal one, we have sound languages, internal somatic languages, ones whereby we might converse with biotic foods, inter species languages whereby we might learn from behavioural nuances, architectural spatial languages, body languages, etc etc sometimes we will need to be able to talk the language of soil and at other times the language of the wind.
The artist Jorinde Voigt has recently been translating written texts in drawings such as her Piece for Words and Views, where she has attempted to translate Roland Barthes’ A Lover's Discourse and Douglas R. Hofstadterʼs Gödel, Escher, Bach. Ein Endloses Geflochtenes Band into a series of 36 drawings. These works centre around particular words selected from Barthes' text and are an attempt to translate complex verbal ideas into a readable visual compositions. “My work is like music,” she says, “You can enjoy it without being able to read the score.”
Jorinde Voigt: Piece for Words and Views
Voigt's integration of text and images sets out to create a balance between two languages, the various linear arcs taken by her flowing writing, integrate with the other formal elements of her compositions, as she attempts to translate academic texts back into the visual poetry from which they would have emerged. I can see several parallels between what she is doing and my own interests in finding a visual language to translate the feelings we have that emanate from inside our bodies. The fact that I am also interested in animism helps to cross the human/object divide, as well as an interest in early magic.
Knee pain as an anthropomorphic entity
My use of images such as the one above about knee pain, in votive rituals, is now being coupled with research into how people both communicate an awareness of inner or somatic awareness and how the communication can become formalised. Each element demands a degree of translation from one type of perceptual awareness into another.
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