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title: Areas of Interest
tags: origins
featured: True
open: True
featured_image: image.jpg
excerpt: This is the introduction of this article
last_update: 2021-07-02
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LINK investigates the notion of ‘translations’ by revealing ways of translating its multiple meanings within specific contexts of discussion, and the use of translation as a methodology. The act of translating is defined as conveying information from one language to another, whether it be code, to spoken word, to non-verbal language, between machines, humans, and living organisms.
The combination of signs within a language develops a coding system to convert raw data to knowledge, which only then can be communicated outside the specific language of origin. It is a hybrid process from which countless forms of languages can emerge and its meaning transforms along the process. All translations must include some form of interpretation along the way, creating various possible iterations and meanings to each one of them. It is easy to misunderstand and make sense of a set of signs which once taken out its context is lost in a world of information.
What are possible experimental languages that could enable conversation between disciplines and approaches? Here we explore the power and complexity of translations, to understand the importance of process and perspective.
In the last decades, the development of information and communications technology (ICT) has multiplied the ways in which visible and invisible information can be exchanged. The speed at which it has evolved is faster than the ability for society to synthesize this information. As a response to this rapid changing ‘state of matter’, an overly connected world has revealed an increasing disconnection to our physical space. Our constant connectivity and energy-intensive information and communications technology structures, have a substantial environmental cost with the ultimate capacity to endanger human’s very own existence on Earth.
Data centres are a technology which organize a company or organisation’s servers, switches, storage space; the entire ICT package manages the environmental conditions of the space (temperature, humidity, dust) to ensure robustness. However this infrastructure’s energy consumption has a rapidly increasing carbon footprint.
“A study from Imperial College London estimated that US data centres used 100 billion litres of water in 2014 to cool their servery.”
Therefore, LINK questions the motivations, moments and methods to connect to the internet in ways that could bring more balance to the relentless pressure put on the Earth’s natural and limited resources.
In an increasingly digital culture of ubiquitous and, ‘immaterial’ technology, we’ve come to ask how do layers of mediation of our environment affect society? How does the infosphere metabolize information and knowledge?
History can explain why we have come today to such complex meaning and form of information. Stemming from economic needs to trade, Sumerians and Egyptians were considered the first to create a writing system, originally a phonemic script which made use of symbols and drawings to represent phonemes - basic sounds. This mode of communication then developed into the latin alphabet and today’s alphabets respond in the best ways to their own status quo.
Our curiosity brought us to seek ways of breaking down our surroundings complex and codified knowledge, and to remap its content to look backinto its meanings and possible alternative translations. Interpretation and creation of language intersects with the interests of LINK, aiming to examine the semiotics of new narratives.
Over the last two decades, data generation and consumption has grown exponentially. It is the result of the transformation of information, by which it seeks to capture elements of the physical world and simulate them for technological use. Each data point represents and communicates a single point of view limited to its own context. LINK explores how we can analyse these points of views to find points of tension, contrast, and connection. What becomes a matter of perception of reality and reality itself? Our society is being conditioned to not see, nor consider, the physical manifestation of our digital interactions. As seen through abstract language used to characterise digital services, ‘The Cloud’ is an ethereal nether; it is simply abstract matter without geographical locations, it obfuscates visibility of physical infrastructure, not allowing for critical reflection. We grow more dependent on the internet in our everyday lives, yet our awareness and consideration of the material processes behind it remains limited.
Fibre optic cables running through the streets, attached to subsea cables running between borders. We do not see the ‘smart city’, of sensors and cameras and towers, it is embedded, ubiquitous. ‘Users are entitled to know what the interface hides. Access to knowledge is a fundamental right.’ Such as the prisoners mistake appearance for reality in Plato’s cave, we have painted images of what the world is like under a digital lens through designed interfaces, coming up with metaphors for perceived reality, painting a narrow image that is merely a singular construction of one reality. Designed icons and pixels that make up images displayed on screen, mediate the space between the screen of a computer and a sighted living being.