Babel-Babble by Sarah Wilhelmy and Joanna Zabielska
Babel-Babble is a multisensory exhibition, incorporating VR, audio-visual projections, and real world installation. We build off of the work of linguistics and authors such as Stan Smith and Neal Alexander (whose paper’s name inspires our work title). Both authors see translation as an intermediary space between translated words, as well as its own space in which concepts and emotions can be studied from a new perspective. As we are Austrian residents but not citizens, with German as a second or third language, this is a very personal philosophical approach. We believe that, if translation is its own experiment, then a language mistake is not a failure or an end, but just the beginning and a new tool for studying our world.
Babel-Babble installation is a collection of our language mistakes that will be enriched over time with contributions of visitors. To begin with we visualize and animate German words that we have mixed up. “Gesicht/Geschichte”, “Nelken/Wolken”, “Kirche/Kirsche”, and “Ziegel/Ziegen” are some of these pairs. Each word pair is studied as its own concept: What happens, for example, if we look for the connection between “Gesicht” and “Geschichte”? We read a story, but we also read the faces of the people around us. Behind our faces are our stories. History, memory, language, and poetry come together in a personal meditation that also speaks to broader concepts of immigration, dislocation and relocation. During the exhibition, we will gather personal stories related to similar mistakes and transform viewers’ contributions into elements of the VR world.
The animation of each mistake-poetry-tool are presented in two ways. Firstly, a VR world is constructed, containing every mistake within Babel-Babble, representing a dreamy, slightly dizzying internal experience. Predefined gestures might take the visitors of the virtual world through its various locations. The audio changes as the viewer approaches each VR animation, and each audio track is built from sound experiments on the selected words, as well as texts and meditations on the specific mistake-tool. Secondly, the animations are choreographed in projected videos that can be seen by all viewers at once. This creates a shared environment and meditation, breaking out of the private internal world.
Since translation in this space is disconnected-reconnected-ambiconnected, our real-world installation emphasizes coziness and embodiment. Textiles and low lighting create a feeling of security, comfort, and welcome. The softness in the installation is also complemented by the soft colors prioritized in the animations.
