作品

About the work

Morphosis is a code based generative project that uses an online translation service to explore the boundary of languages and the aesthetics of machine translation. 

A short piece of text written in English by the artist is translated to a random language supported on the online website Bing Translate and then back to the original English. The translated sentence is re-submitted until it becomes too short or stops changing, causing the program to move to the next.  One after another, a sentence is sentenced to death.

In the constant translation process, new words appear out of context and sentences truncate.  Translation becomes a trail of how meaning is lost through replacements of words, changes in sentence structure or sudden occurrences of the absurd, when poetic contingency emerges from imperfections in translations. The text keeps evolving itself as if it is a creature with heartbeats and its creator is the collective consciousness of all the languages covered in the piece.

About the artist

Qianxun Chen is a media artist, programmer, and researcher. She works at the intersection of language, art, and digital technology, with a focus on digital textuality, generative poetics and the aesthetics of algorithms. Her work has been published or exhibited internationally, including MIT CAST, Electronic Literature Collection, and Click Festival. She holds an MFA in Digital Language Arts from Brown University and a Bachelor degree in Media Arts from School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.