art
Being Borges
Being Borges, presented by Office Impart, proposes a new form of literary translation, begging the question: What’s at stake when language becomes literal via the visual?
In this 12-part series, Ana María Caballero takes Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s The Book of Imaginary Beings (a vast compendium of humanity’s imagined creatures) and its 1970 English translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni as points of departure from which to explore how AI interprets Spanish versus English text, unmasking biases ingrained in large data sets.
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Shang Yang: The Rain Bird
This collection also delves into the impossibility of translation–AI cannot “read” Spanish and English in the same way because they are different sign systems, with nuances and meanings that exist beyond their constructed signifiers, their words.
Caballero’s process was three-fold. She first used Borges and Guerrero’s Spanish descriptions of imaginary beings as prompts to create a large corpus of images, from which one was selected. The process was repeated using di Giovanni’s English translations.
Thirdly, Caballero wrote a new poem—an inspired, compressed recasting of the original Spanish text and used this poem to create an additional array of images. Her poems delve into the poetics of prompts, incorporating text-to-image generation semantics in their construction.
The Double
‘I do not know which of us has written this page.’
Jorge Luis Borges
No additional words or punctuation marks were used other than Borges and Guerrero’s, di Giovanni’s and her own. The image-generation was guided solely by these raw text inputs and via parametrization, thus each output represents a literal, visual translation of the texts.
The Chinese Unicorn
Each Being is brought to life via a collage that brings together Borges and Guerrero’s descriptions of the imaginary beings, di Giovanni’s translations and Caballero’s poems into a triangulation of shared signification and of striking contrast.
Each of Caballero’s original poems is offered as a single edition, signed print.
The Hundred-Heads?
Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne, via which Calle attempts to describes a subject by documenting her efforts to approach him, inspired Caballero to access the core myths in Borges and Guerrero’s book through multiple texts, seeking to humanize the fantastical by mapping these stories as analog, documentary-style photographs rather than painted, digitized or otherwise imagined forms. The interplay of text and image in Being Borges pays homage to Calle’s work.
Being Borges invites viewers to experience language as a transdisciplinary work of art, one that expresses meaning beyond its systems of signification.
T’ao T’ieh
Beings brought to life:
A Bao A Qu
Shang Yang: The Rain Bird
T’ao T’ieh
The Chinese Unicorn
The Double
The Elephant that Foretold the Birth of the Buddha
The Hundred-Heads
The Monkey of the Inkpot
The Simurgh: King of the Birds
The Tension between Translation and Interpretation in Ana María Caballero’s “Being Borges”
By Virginia Valenzuela
What happens to an artwork once the artist whispers its existence into the world? The artist’s intentions, though primal to the work, disappear, and it is but the viewer’s reaction that defines its meaning. The same thing can be said of any thoughts we are brave enough to translate into the spoken or written word. The listener, or reader, decodes our meaning. The original is at the mercy of the interpreter, just as the interpreter is at the mercy of the skill and precision used to create the original.
?Introduction to Being Borges with Office Impart and Verse.
Opening of Being Borges as part of the Close Reading exhibition, Office Impart, January 2024, Berlin.
Reading from the Being Borges series at Paris Photo, Office Impart Booth, 2024.
today is the release of Being Borges, a project I've been ideating for over a year.
many layers to peel back…please, lend me your digital ears? pic.twitter.com/uwH2aPrP3m
— Ana María Caballero (@CaballeroAnaMa) October 25, 2023