Community Interpreting
Video Installation with Synchronously Controlled
DVD Video Projections/Video Monitors
Bettina Henkel
In Community Interpreting two deaf persons, a woman and a man, tell each
other
jokes in sign language. These sign language jokes are specifically based
on visual,
spatial and gestural elements for which there are no direct equivalents
in spoken
language. Thus, they cannot really be translated. Sign language differs
from
spoken language in that its structure is non-linear. Its content, consisting
of both
iconographic and arbitrary elements, is represented “as movement”
and “in space.”
The title Community Interpreting comes from the field of translation studies
and
refers to the inscrutable, context-sensitive aspects of interpreting/translating.
The conversation involving two people telling jokes was recorded simultaneously
by six cameras along the three spatial axes (x, y, z). The projections/monitors
display
various jokes being told either in parallel or serial fashion, with the
jokes signed
alternately by Alexey and by Gitta Svetlof-Palecek. The work is viewed
on six video
projections or monitors arranged to form a video surface, whereby both
persons
are simultaneously displayed from the front, in profile and from above.
The video
monitors or projectors synchronously display the various jokes being told
in a number
of different spatial perspectives, whereby the respective spatial perspectives
switch as if at random among the various projectors/monitors. Subsequently,
the
views within each screen undergo dynamic changes, switching positions
with one
another so that they are recombined in all possible spatial constellations.
Viewers will try to extract meaning from the signed content and probably
notice
that the two protagonists are telling each other jokes, or at least something
funny.
Their interaction is so affirmative that viewers are fascinated even though,
as people
are able to hear, they do not “understand” anything.
Translated from the German by Mel Greenwald