when is a panda not a panda?

2012/05/21

solar eclipse at 7.30 am today in Nagoya

[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

2012/05/14

I made a sculpture today on our roof. It was part of Carrie’s Global/Local Project

Also made a wee video of my struggles which I’ll post asap.

2012/05/14

2012/05/13

The world has become smaller and smaller, with people from places thousands of miles away from each other being able to communicate instantly through the internet and telephones. It is unlikely that you won’t be able to find a “foreigner” somewhere close by, no matter where you are.

We are more and more often relying on technology to make life easier for us. It cuts out all the tricky bits. However, as we have discovered, here in Japan google translate doesn’t quite live up to our expectations - coming up with some quite bizarre and comical results.

2012/05/13

This not only reiterates the fact that a computer programme is a poor substitute for a human being, but also highlights the cultural differences that are easily overlooked in something as superficial as grammar.

For this project I asked each of the exchange students from Brighton University to choose a poem in their native tongue which they associate strongly with their language. I believed that using poetry would be one of the best ways to demonstrate technology’s inability to translate art or language sufficiently. Especially when translation is even a terribly difficult task for a person skilled in both languages (something which I am definitely not when it comes to Japanese).

2012/05/13

“To translate from one language to another is a fearsome task. It is a fitting punishment for that human pride which led to the great confusion of languages.”

- Noboyuki Yuasa, Basho; The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

2012/05/09

I made a ring today (yesterday) look at my lovely mosquito bites.

2012/04/28

» Square Watermelon?: Bashō

squaremelons:

I’ve started reading some of Bashō’s travel sketches since being here. It’s funny to read about a poet from the 1600’s travelling around Japan, especially now I can recognise the names of places we’ve been to or are planning to go. I’ve been interested in the subtle differences in our languages - reading his prose and haiku translated into english is quite strange, knowing that the words are not those that he originally wrote and that they are almost as much the creation of the translator, Noboyuki Yuasa, as they are his. I liked what Yuasa wrote in his acknowledgement at the beginning:

“To translate from one language to another is a fearsome task. It is a fitting punishment for that human pride which led to the great confusion of languages. When the present work was begun some three years ago, a friend of mine […] remarked in an innocent manner that I was attempting an impossibility […] a more sympathetic friend questioned whether I had the same command of english as Bashō did of the language in which he wrote. It is, therefore, with a great deal of humility and self reproach that I am now sending the work to the press.”

Since we are heading to Tokyo tonight with little/no idea where we are going to be staying or what we are going to be doing I thought it would be fitting to share a poem that Bashō wrote as he was leaving Edo (Tokyo) to start on a journey similar to ours:

“Determined to fall
A weather exposed skeleton
I cannot help the sore wind
Blowing through my heart.

After ten autumns
In Edo, my mind
Points back to it
As my native place.”

2012/04/21

macha tea and japanese sweets

2012/04/21

Margaux in Tokoname

2012/04/06

JAPAN

I’ve just moved to Japan for four months and started to write about it in a new blog - www.squaremelons.tumblr.com

have a peek!

2012/03/27

I am interested in the action of making. The way that people can take one idea - whether it be a sound, a story, an object - and transform it completely. I feel that no matter what you do, there is always the essence of it’s origin, embedded within the thing itself.

I like to think that the work I exhibited in Frame, Shape and Shift was a fragment of an ongoing progression. Ultimately it is the story of how one thing can begin and end and begin and end infinitely changing.

for this piece
- a story was first recorded being told from memory
- the recording was then put through a computer programme which converted the intonation of the voice into musical notes
- the resulting music was then played and recorded
- an aleatoric score was created from listening to the music
- the score was then reduced to a single line
- this line was then played and recorded.