Industrial production processes applied to literary translation and cultural creation.
The production process behind any industrial artifact is generally imagined as aseptic, linear, and precise. The very notion of industrial processing implies rational choices, logical procedures, measurable results. But what happens when the laws of mechanical production are applied to language, art, and other forms of human expression? Can consciousness be truly and utterly controlled?
In this volume, the industrial process is symbolically rendered through the automated translation of a literary artifact. By enabling real-time transmission of meaning between different languages, machine translation is a tool that serves a migrant as much as a tourist, a trader, or a shipping company. It is both a product and a key logistical asset in our era of globalized information exchange. But what if translation, and hence communication, ceased to be the primary purpose of linguistic transformation? What if the serial production of a text became instead a strategy to ensure its preservation? How does the concept of authorship change in light of a text that exists only as the automatic translation of itself?
Industrial seeks not to answer these questions, but to weave speculative threads of doubt and possibility. Over the course of this formal and conceptual investigation, rational processes were subject to self-sabotage strategies that interfered with their linear progression, thereby warping the texture of experience, eluding the self-imposed order of consciousness, and opening doors to the unexpected.
