Inter-Channel Translation (2008) | Video
Inter-Channel Translation (2008) is a video work that digitally processes an analogue written record of a series of conversations overheard during a train journey from London to Paris in March 2007.
The written observations of these conversations are combined with a non-textual symbolic system that attempts to map the spatial relationships between speaker, listener, and their surroundings. Loosely based on a form of dance notation developed by Rudolf Laban, the system translates the overheard conversations into a visual language of position, direction, and duration. The “I” at the centre of each image functions as a constant: the point from which both the artist and the viewer perceive the surrounding space. The oval surrounding this central point indicates the direction from which a conversation is perceived, while the text at the bottom of the image records the time and seat number, anchoring each observation to a specific moment and location.
The original observations are necessarily subjective, shaped by the position, perception, and interpretation of the person recording them. Through the process of translation from experience, to written record, to symbolic notation, and finally to digital moving image, however, the work moves progressively further from the event it describes. The film is no longer a straightforward documentation of a particular time and place; the conversations themselves are absent, and there is no accompanying sound. Instead, what remains is a series of mediated traces in which information has been reorganised, transformed, and inevitably lost.
Inter-Channel Translation therefore considers the distance between an event and its representation, and the ways in which acts of recording and translation alter what can be known or reconstructed. The work asks what happens to an observed reality as it passes between different systems of communication: from speech to writing, from writing to notation, and from notation to image.
Below are the seating patterns in a musical score:
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