From Space to Language to (Cyber)Space

Globalization would be perfect if it brought more justice and equality to the world, but it doesn't. Artists dream of using computer or digital means to have contact and to bring continents closer. But once you have the information, it's up to you what you do with it.

Harald Szeemann, "Here Time Becomes Space: A Conversation with Harald Szeemann," Sculpture Magazine, June 2001 - Vol.20 No.5

An earlier generation of artists struggled with the incorporation of software and information into art practice in, for example, the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information organized by Harald Szeemann in 1969. Language, text, and conceptual art became the means with which to effect this incorporation and the dematerialization of the art form. Thirty years later we face exactly the opposite problem. Computers and networks are built with hardware and software codes, a fundamentally textual, linguistic medium that is considered to be non-material. But, to understand the radical transformations effected through these linguistic means -- the production of cyberspace and the roles of computers and networks as forces of globalization -- we need to develop an approach to inhabit and visualize computer-based or computer-mediated language as a space or material form.

In the following we examine a particular linguistic process -- the process of translation . We review how translation has been approached as a technical problem of computer science. We suggest an alternative approach and propose a specific work to enact this approach as a piece of software. Our alternative 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" (Bruno Latour, Science in Action , 1988). 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.