Project

Kulaktan kulağa, Chinese whispers, or Arabic telephone 2018

“I’m on the hard drive. When the gift came. Both disk and memory disappear”.

Kulaktan kulağa reveals mis(machine)translated stories of found images through tangible interaction. Kulaktan kulağa, Chinese whispers, or Arabic telephone is an interactive installation inviting people to pass around the stories of found images. The installation uses what is (at first glance) just a box of old photographs to examine the western-centric lens of the internet by humanizing machine translation errors. It invites spectators to select a story and explore its interpretation. The interpretation becomes garbled along the way, until it significantly deviates from the initial interpretation due to the inaccurate machine translations of non-Indo-European languages. Kulaktan kulağa is included in ELMCIP Knowledge Base. Exhibitions •Peripheries: Electronic literature and new media art, The Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland (2019) •The Art of Imperfection, Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria (2018)