Rinko's diary googlemangled

[imomus]

I've mentioned Rinko Kawauchi's diary before. In her exhibitions this great photographer works with large format cameras and big scale prints. But for her Foil blog she snaps with a keitai phone camera. One picture per day, always the same aspect ratio: upright. Sometimes Rinko shoots into a flaring light, sometimes up at the sky or the ceiling, sometimes down at her feet. Sometimes she snaps food, other times an animal or a flower. I think we're very lucky to have this diary, which has a modest, poetic flavour all of its own.



There's also poetry in the Japanese texts. If you Google Translate them into English you get some very peculiar phrases indeed. I must admit I've been using some of these in my lyric composition. Here are some picks from what Google made of Rinko's January entries.



January 30th
The tremendously lovely amulet is received. It is dense, with the [illegible] of the bee.

January 29th
It goes to the visit of the friend who is hospitalized. Because is not possible at all, inhaling the foot, stroking the head, it returned.

January 28th
Receiving the handmade Japanese radish, it is delightful.

January 27th
Opening and/or closing the big cardboard, concentrating at a stroke, it categorizeeed.

January 26th
Somehow, however you kept wearing the kimono by yourself, in the various person.

January 25th
Joint life 4 of girls was visible, however perhaps, there is a variety, very pleasantly so.

January 24th
It has teaching the compilation of image, to Special Interest Group Ro.

January 23rd
You feel that one day passes lately quickly.

January 22nd
When morning, the curtain is opened, the snowman and the eye were agreeable.

January 21st
Wearing the socks, wearing the underwear, wearing the kimono, it winds the band.

January 20th
Outside heavy snow. Doubtful by your the circumstances from the place where it is far a little it photographs with the video camera,

January 19th
The camera bag and the tripod of ideal it goes to Ginza in searching.

January 18th
Sometimes, with the notion that where, the Eguti male be completed it makes the store keep accompanying with everyone it probably will go to the kind of place which always it cannot go.

January 17th
Morning, real the burglar intrudes inside you looked at dream.

January 16th
After cleaning cheerfully, it went to the gym, bought the beer and the wine and the flower to the return.

January 15th
A little, you received the telephone from the person where communication has broken off, very became delightful.

January 14th
Rain.

January 13th
Cold one day. The cat had died with Kawahara.

January 12th
Not making the change of feeling good, drag to useless mode and be troubled it may.

January 11th
It goes to the vaccination of yellow fever in order to go to next month Brazil.

January 10th
It is what, becoming the kind of feeling which keeps the girl small of the kindred, the various knobs remaining ones it puts out.


This stuff makes me think about the uses of inexactitude. Google translation is in its "poetry golden age" precisely because it is inexact. Who knows how long this golden age will last before perfection moves in, destroying the poetry? I feel the same way about my own very limited Japanese skills. In a vocabulary of perhaps 400 words, I know two words for "mushroom" and two words for "sorry". This is in some ways more telling than if I knew the whole lexicon.

The unreliable tour guide act I'm about to do at the Whitney also works with inexactitude. Everything I say about the work on display will be false, but the wrongness will be like a torch beam shining light on the work from a parallel world, the parallel world in which that information is true. The relationship between these two worlds will be telling, perhaps more telling than a true and exact description. Inexactitude has the advantage of creating a parallel world for us (the world where its lies and mistakes are truths and facts), whereas exactitude's claim to be the single right answer can only be arrogant, reductive and boring, an appeal to authority rather than the imagination.

Exactitude contains the delusion that one language maps to another, or that true descriptions are possible. Inexactitude is puckish (though we don't want to fly in a plane piloted by Puck).

Exoticism is only made possible by inexactitude. Exoticism is that place where we invest all we don't know about someone with glamour. Inexactitude is the soil for the flowers of fascination.

Comments

[maybeimdead.livejournal.com]

but isn't inexactitude also the seed of racism?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is. But racism is universal and completely unavoidable so long as race continues to be "a difference that makes a difference". So what we have is a choice between a racism of admiration (exoticism, orientalism) and a racism of contempt.

[maybeimdead.livejournal.com]

Do you believe admiration is a one-way relationship between the admirer and the admiree, or is it symbiotic? What about unwanted admiration (meaning admiration of the "wrong" qualities)? Do you think the admirer imposes any power toward the person being admired?

I dunno.. I've always felt iffy about this kinda thing.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd like to ask you which of these statements you agree with:

1. "We only dislike people because we don't know enough about them."
2. "We only like people because we don't know enough about them."
3. "We only dislike people because we don't imagine enough about them."
4. "We only like people because we don't imagine enough about them."
5. "People dislike us when we imagine good stuff about them."
6. "People like us when we imagine good stuff about them."
7. "People dislike us when we imagine bad stuff about them."
8. "People like us when we imagine bad stuff about them."
9. "When we imagine bad stuff about people, we also imagine them disliking us,"
10. "Imagination and whether and why we like people can be controlled by our moral sense, and should be."

[maybeimdead.livejournal.com]

This might sound like a cop out, but I can't wholly agree with any of these. For me it's about compassion to understand my own desires and motivations, but also trying to develop an awareness to whether my actions cause any undo suffering on others. Being considerate and individual is a tender balance to me.

I've heard the terms "good at math", "inscrutable", "dependable" hurled at me, a kind of Asian-American model minority ethic. But does that really say anything about who I am? What if I wanted to be you?

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

I recently started collecting subject lines from spam. The drug pushing spam is usually better than the sex spam. I wonder how they generate them.

Some examples:

Issey Miyake Helium Escape Valve

not adject Fredia

and turntable it successful

night, if I had not been free of any share in that.

Dear Sir, i am interested in it

telescope, it's Philipa

Small lingerie may warfare

[lightfromlight.livejournal.com]

http://www.spamusement.com

Translation Poetry

[(Anonymous)]

One of my favourite poetic google translations was from an origami site with instructions on how to make an origami Totoro (http://flickr.com/photos/neil_b/13024391/). A translation of the page yielded this wonderful line:

"It will expand with everyone, the wheel of the folded paper!"

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

Looking forward to seeing you at the Biennial. Is there any way I could find out when I should go specifically?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'll be there, in theory, all day. But avoid the end of May.

[nomorepolitics.livejournal.com]

Kawauchi's photos are like small soluble dessert pictures that you can put on your tongue for a mind altering experience. They look as delicious as they are perfectly aesthetically pleasing. They remind me of a childhood story (only available in some slavic languages), that I read about a scientist/magician professor whose main subsistence consisted of multicolored moles which resembled confetti that were then prepared for use by some scientific or magical process; they were supplied by a barber, who removed them from his clients while cutting their hair. The curriculum at his academy consisted of visiting different fairytales to run errands, throwing paint on walls and interpreting them as images, and throwing parties for guests form other fairytales. He would also collect all the children's dreams from their magic bedside mirrors, making sure that they had good dreams, and then reading their best dreams in class.

The pictures in Kawauchi's diary remind me both of the mirrors and the magic confetti moles.

[300letters.livejournal.com]

Inexactitude is the soil for the flowers of fascination.

I love the soil. The overlap between two imperfect understandings is the fractal reality we inhabit.

[nomorepolitics.livejournal.com]

All understanding is perfect; it's understanding that's imperfect.

[300letters.livejournal.com]

All understanding is perfect; it's understanding that's imperfect.

Yes! Exactly.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Laughingly gnomic!

[alionunderaw.livejournal.com]

some of those translated phrases are really gorgeous. i'd like to ahem, make use of some of them myself.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ownership is also an area of delicious inexactitude here. Does Rinko own these phrases for writing Japanese phrases tenuously related to them? Does Google own them for making howling mistakes? Do I own them for designating Google's howlers "poetry"? Or are they free from all human agency and ownership, beautiful verbal objects that hang in the sky like stars, leaves or lost gloves?

[alionunderaw.livejournal.com]

It is! I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about this and coming up with loose ends. I mean, words can be considered public space, can't they? I suppose traditionally speaking, it's the arrangement of the words themselves that "belongs" to whoever arranged them and this:

Does Rinko own these phrases for writing Japanese phrases tenuously related to them? Does Google own them for making howling mistakes? Do I own them for designating Google's howlers "poetry"?

is exactly it. I have no idea. But I do love it. In fact I love the idea that they just hang there for the taking....!

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Do I own them for designating Google's howlers "poetry"?

Here are the first few lines of "Howl" translated into Japanese and then back into English:

The empty eyed which as for me it is to be destroyed the heart where my formation is best the hipsters which burns because related to ancient sky to the starry die/di ナモ of the machines of the angelheaded night crossing destitution and the び rag and on the city where jazz is looked were seen in the dawn which searches the predicament which is gotten angry the insanity which pulls through the sort of the black namely the hysterical which is hungry it exposed due to, the water which floats is cool and flatly smokes with the supernatural darkness of the box high Saturday

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

I've come to think of translation as being analogous to image resolution loss, like when you go from .psd to a web-quality .jpg. The greater the difference between languages, the greater the loss of resolution. It gets blurry. And it is fascinating.

As a linguist, I have my doubts that Google translate (or whatever software) is going to get very much better. Translating a language requires comprehending a language, which is much tricker than just having a command of syntax and vocabulary. Until you can invent software that can tell and awkward from a graceful speech act, there will be your resolution loss, linguistic impressionism.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Until you can invent software that can tell and awkward from a graceful speech act, there will be your resolution loss, linguistic impressionism.

I think you're right. For instance, I immediately read that sentence as "Until you can invent software that can tell an awkward from a graceful speech act, there will be your resolution loss, linguistic impressionism." That's what you meant, but not what you wrote (you put an "and" instead of an "an"). I need to be a human to know what you mean, even before you say it, and even if you say it differently. I need a knowledge of context and culture, a world picture into which you sentence plugs.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

..."your sentence plugs", as you probably picked up, but a machine might not!

Inexactitudes of destruction

[(Anonymous)]

Sadly Mssrs Bush and Blair have really nailed the whole parallel world where otherly-things-are-true angle. There's something so Strangelove about the idea of painting planes a confusing colour. Now read on...


"Revealed: Bush and Blair discussed using American Spyplane in UN colours to lure Saddam into war.

Channel 4 News reveals extraordinary details of George Bush and Tony Blair's pre-war meeting in January 2003 at which they discussed plans to begin military action on 10 March 2003, irrespective of whether the United Nations had passed a new resolution authorising the use of force.

Channel 4 News has seen minutes from that meeting, which took place in the White House on 31 January 2003. The two leaders discussed the possibility of securing further UN support, but President Bush made it clear that he had already decided to go to war. The details are contained in a new version of the book 'Lawless World' written by a leading British human rights lawyer, Philippe Sands QC.

All the details at:
http://www.channel4.com/news/special-reports/whitehouse_meeting_memo.html "

Alex

Re: Inexactitudes of destruction

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, I read that this morning. I mean, we all know that Bush and Blair made this decision to invade in January 2003. It was screamingly obvious. But it's good that we keep screaming it in their ears, with evidence. I notice the White House issued a statement saying they don't want to "re-litigate" the war at this point. Of course they don't want to, because the end result may just be that we "de-litigate" Bush (ie impeach him). Blair, of course, has already said "I'll get my coat..."

[nanomythologies.livejournal.com]

I absolutely love the photographs. There is something very wabi-sabi about them, they really are like visual haiku.

And I agree about inexactitude. It also allows to invest the exotic thing or person with characteristics you want to invest them with, but hey, isn't that desire?

[she-ghost.livejournal.com]

i'm touched.
modesty and poetry are so very underrated.

[csn.livejournal.com]

hurray, pretentious garbage.