The protocol (is) the artwork, or Can transaction be its own reward?

"In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful."

Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator

How does one deliver a message to someone one doesn't know? This would depend on one's definition of "deliver." In the context of global telecommunications, we would develop a protocol for distributing/translating digital messages and other digital goods in terms of LOCATION and LANGUAGE. This should be a hybrid protocol, able to function within (legible by?) digital networks, carrying payload from computer to computer, and also beyond a purely electro-digital realm, transmitting its information from electronic signal into physical form.

Unlike current tools for accomplishing automatic translation, ours conjoins physical movement or electronic transaction with linguistic translation. Piggybacking on existing socio-digital "peer-to-peer" networks such Gnutella and AOL Instant Messanger, our parasitic messaging system fragments a message sent through it into smaller pieces and disperses these pieces over these networks, seeking to utilize their infrastructures as means toward effecting a collaborative interlinguistic translation of the message. In other words, rather than submitting a message to a "bot" translator in order to have the bot return the decoded version, we would enable people on the network to collaboratively translate a message piece by piece, forwarding along to others its pieces. The sum of the translation of the message would emerge in the process of the latter's dislocation, rather than in its distillation into an understandable (or delivered) product.

Unlike messaging systems we have seen until now (email clients, instant messengers, peer-to-peer, Usenet-style discussion), ours would allow users to track a message visually as it is TRANSLATED from addressee to addressee, from language to language. A message in transit would be trackable by anyone on the network, but would not necessarily divulge the legal identity of its addressees. A user could watch and investigate the path of the message as a history of its transformations within a distributed economy of languages. This history would be shown as a transformative collage of the message's pieces and their respective permutations as they are translated and forwarded through the system. The overall form of such collage would be determined by mapping between the development of the translation in language and time, and a geographic visualization of its movement, with an understanding that its linguistic translation will not necessarily be consistent with the boundaries of nations.

In addition, in order to create a conduit for the message to travel outside digital networks, we will develop a printing protocol which would translate the "transformative collage" into a three-dimensional collage of interlocking shapes. The 3-D collage would be both representational of the overall structure of the translation, while its component parts would be physical instantiations of its linguistic fragments, each its own enfolded message/envelop.

"Our" protocol will be embodied in a parasitic peer-to-peer application that would connect to/between existing socio-digital networks such as gnutella and AOL Instant Messenger. The protocol will enable users to forward and/or translate a message's fragments, while allowing them to reference the original message as well as its "in transit," collage version. There is no requirement that a user translate linguistically or spatially a received message. The emphasis is on the protocol. However, our application could "package" with it access/links to known translation tools to frame the context of the traffic, much as Gnutella clients currently show MP3 sampling bitrates, even though the protocol they employ was designed to transmit a less specific type of payload. Likewise, our protocol would enable users to "translate" fragments by adding to or substituting for the received fragment with other digital objects. Such displacement would be a valid form of translation as long as the message is forwarded on the network.

In the end (and from the beginning), we intend to release publically "our" protocol.