“Noise and Translation: Remapping Habitus Across the US/Turkey Border” presented by Lichty
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Short:Circuit: Cross Border Communications in New Media Between US and Turkey
Presentation Title:
- Noise and Translation: Remapping Habitus Across the US/Turkey Border
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: Short:Circuit: Cross Border Communications in New Media Between US and Turkey
Theorist Gayatri Spivak wrote of the politics of translation as being intrinsic to the construction of meaning if one looks at language as being central to that locus of meaning. But if we can use the distance between root languages (Altaic for Turkish and Anglo-Frisian for English) as metaphor for distance, between cultures, to a sense of home, in translation of meaning and identity. In American cultural terms, the 20th century dream was that of assimilation, or is now possibly that of heterogenous integration. However, for many artists crossing into the position of geographical otherness, the issues of translation, dislocation, and nomadism reemerge within the work. To consider Shannon and the idea of noise in the transmission of ideas, including interpersonal relations, how does translation of alterity of space, time, culture and identity evidence itself through the milieu of cultural production?
Asking the question of why recurrent issues emerge is not enough, but examination of the phenomenology of dialogue between these milieux can lend insight into the experiences of artists who have traversed spaces which, in their own way, have been everything yet nothing. This would be America, superpower without identity, and Turkey part of Europe, Middle East, and Eurasia and center of Byzantium. This presentation will examine works by Turkish and Anglo-American artists who have either worked, studied,or created in the other country. This discussion will also explore points of translation, mapping of meaning, and recurrent themes, not insofar to reductivize this matrix of relationships, but to consider the role of liminality as expressed by the work of both sets of artists. This simultaneous locus of commonality and dislocation becomes the expression of “others” who have themselves been influenced by that “other” place to reflect on their own hybridity and alterity.
