I have been struggling to find interviews with artists exploring the idea of language. Maybe because I’m searching for them in English? The only artist coming close to the perspective I am trying to take is writer Yoko Tawada, whom I have spoken about in a previous post. I was hoping for some sound artists with similar interest.
(An interesting thing to mention: I recently came across Fifty Sounds, by Polly Barton. A book about a british Japanese to English translator who moves to Japan and how that causes her relationship to language to change. Focuses on onomatopoeic sounds. I have yet to read it in its entirety so cannot comment on it too much, but it’s just interesting that Japanese is also one of the languages involved.)
Back to sound arts. I have found Rully Shabara. His work explores the idea of language in general and not bilingualism. At this point it’s looking like my audio paper is going to have two sections. Starting with a section focusing on living in two tongues, and diverging into language and meaning more broadly.
Here is an interview I am thinking of using in my audio paper. I’m torn between using multiple languages or just sticking to English. I do not feel like I want to split it between English and Romanian (which is my mother tongue), as it would make it one-sided. I think. I’m not sure. But at this point it doesn’t feel right. I think my perspective is focused on English as a global language, the internet language, against the rest, the multiplicity. So I think if there is gonna be a foreign language, there are gonna be many.
Onto the interview.
All of the points he makes are things I am interested in. Data as language. The desire to mimic humans. Is there something inherently human that cannot be replicated and automated? Is there something in the human voice that goes beyond mimesis?
He speaks of creating a new language. Zugrafi langauge. Inscribed in a stone. The order he went about doing this in itself is interesting. Writing first. Meaning later. We always assume speech came first and writing came as its’ visual representation. It’s something Jacques Derrida contests:
In Derrida’s view, all linguistic theories, from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, have given undue importance to speech rather than writing. Of course, it is indeed probable that spoken language existed before written language. Even this, however, is not certain. Mightn’t marks made on a stone, imbued with meaning, have come before intelligible vocal utterances? But Derrida is not primarily concerned with this historical question. Rather, he believes that thinking about the characteristics of written signs more readily reveals the distinctive features necessary for any linguistic phenomenon. Concentrating on speech, by contrast, readily leads to misleading assumptions which can be summed up in his phrase “the philosophy of presence”. (https://philosophynow.org/issues/100/Derrida_On_Language)