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For more than twenty years, Muntadas has been making installations which use deconstructive strategies to reveal the symbolic and political meanings behind agencies and structures like the media, the art gallery, the home, the stadium, the automobile, and television. In all these works, Muntadas has analyzed power relations and exposed their underlying value systems. On Translation, Muntadas’ Internet project, is one part of a series of four projects he realized between 1995 and 1997. The first was On Translation; The Pavilion, which highlighted the importance of translation during international conferences like the European Conference on Security and Cooperation in Helsinki in 1975. The second project, On Translation: The Games, created for the Olympic Games in Atlanta, revealed the cultural disparities in national representations of those Games (an analysis later picked up by the media, which broadened the impact of this work). On Translation: The Transmission consisted of a televised lecture with simultaneous translation. On Translation: The Internet, conceived especially for documenta X’s website, links three simple concepts: a) the way news spreads by word of mouth; b) the process of translation; and c) the Internet as system and network. Implementing this project requires the use of both public and private networks, in order to link the twenty-odd translators, posted in as many countries, whose job it is to endlessly repeat the translation of a sentence into twenty languages. Transmitted directly from one translator to another by e-mail or fax, "the" sentence varies endlessly, being retranslated anew each time. The difficulty of transmitting information thus recurs on several levels: the co-ordinated network of translators, the interpretation of the text, the illegibility of certain characters as they are transmitted by e-mail, and the constantly evolving nature of the whole. It is possible to follow this evolution of the phrase from day to day on the World Wide Web. In this new project, Muntadas continues to explore what is at stake in transcription, interpretation, and translation, from language to code, from science to technology, from subjectivity to objectivity. Thus he contributes to making visible the role of translation and translators. Simon Lamunière |