Description
The piece is an "installation"..
something immersive... the most important thing is the feeling you receive
back.. and of course, being a conceptual work, people need to read a couple of
paragraphs to understand it
Epic Tales is php based online engine translating and substituting Modern
English words with Old English words using a 2500 entries vocabulary taken from
the Beowulfmanuscript . Beowulf written in Old English sometime before the tenth
century A.D., describes the adventures of a great Scandinavian warrior of the
sixth century. Beowulf is the oldest surviving epic in British literature.
All the pages are destylized
and reformatted using the BeoWulf font loading it online, so without installing
it on your machine. (This font has designed following the original Beowulf
manuscript)
All the images are processed, transformed in greyscale mode,
losing also quality.
here are visualization samples: 1
(cnn.com) - 2 (cnn.com) - 3
(nytimes.com)
The sound streaming is a really powerful epic war song by
yat.kha.
In the
end the processed page loses its glamour, its graphic layout, becoming flat..
without emotions.
It looks also as an old manuscript. It's a piece about how
the time can change the perspective of our "violence" from "big drama and blood"
of our daily news to heroes and epic behaviours of people of the past.
I
think there are many ways to look at the piece and the Borges quotation is a way
to underline another point of view: When you don't understand a language you
focus your attention to sound and form...
Nobody can read old English
I think, but you can easily understand the "main subject" of what you are
reading, even if translated and with that strange font.
In the end the web
page looks like and old epic book, where you can not see anymore the glam of
colors and words but just raw b-n photos and a medieval txt.
I think people should not
read the translated text but they should browse those pages as when you open an
old book with engravings...
I think all our daily behaviours are in some
ways "militaristic" oriented. And above all all gov behaviours are. But
everything is hidden by adv and pr campaigns.
Also there is a tradition in
educating people in believing in their own innocence, fighting back without
caring about why things happened.. a kind of Passive - Aggressive National
education.
cz
Keywords
-Society’s Portrait
-Epic vs. Drama - a time based distinction
-Fight to impose your
own standards
-Natural Behaviour and Behavioural Needs
-Media coverage
Exposure/Affection
-Passive - Aggressive National education
-Daily Post -Traumatic
Stress Disorders
EpicTales
Carlo Zanni's EpicTales offers us a
prism through which we can view our own society and its' militaristic
tendencies. Using a php based online engine, EpicTales translates and
substitutes English words with Old English words drawn from the Beowulf
manuscript. When a user types in a url (www.cnn.com <http://www.cnn.com>
for instance) the page is displayed in a disconcerting combination of modern
English and the Anglo-Saxon of an ancient warrior culture.
The work recognizes the ephemerality and ghostliness of the webpage and employs it to expose the old mankilling currents that run beneath the gloss of contemporary language. This is most striking when Zanni's engine is used to scan news sites and reportage of current events. The cosmetic sheen of political spin doctors and compliant journalists is stripped back, baring the raw violence of war that is so carefully packaged for consumers.
At the same this process makes us aware of the gap between the terrible banality of war today and the way in which we glamourise the act with hindsight. Beowulf raises the act of a warrior to 'epic' status, granting authority and dignity to a culture that lives by the sword - a high culture propaganda vehicle for a ruthless ideology.
Zanni's choice of poetic vocabulary has other consequences. The Beowulf poet often confers a dream quality on his narrative, rendering it a hallucinatory internal experience for his audience. Making strange the world around us, we gain a new perspective on our language and culture.
Recently the Irish poet Seamus Heaney prefaced his translation of Beowulf by pointing out that there is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet's sense of the world that gives his lines immense emotional credibility and allows him to make general observations about life that are far too grounded in experience and reticence to be called 'moralizing'
This honesty that Heaney
describes brings us back to EpicTales and its' logo based on a drawing by
Leonardo entitled 'fight for the standards'. It may be likely that Leonardo was
suggesting soldiers should rally to their flags and regimental standards. It is
tempting though to misread the title as a call to defend other standards in
society - a realistic awareness of the implications of military power, a clear
appraisal of the glamourisation of past wars and recognition of the value of
plain speaking.
Francis McKee
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Borges quote from 'On
Blindness'
I remember that at home there were two books I
could retrieve. I
had placed them on the highest shelf, thinking I would
never use them.
They were Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader and The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle. Both
had glossaries. And so we gathered one morning in the
National Library.
I thought: I
have lost the visible world, but now I am going to
recover another, the world
of my distant ancestors, those tribes of men
who rowed across the stormy
northern seas, from Germany, Denmark, and
the Low Countries, who conquered
England, and after whom we name England
- since Angle-Land, land of the
Angles, had previously been called the
land of the Britons, who were
Celts.
It was a
Saturday morning. We gathered In Groussac's office, and
we began to read. It
was a situation that pleased and mortified us, and
at the same time filled us
with a certain pride. It was the fact that
the Saxons, like the
Scandinavians, used two runic letters to signify
the two sounds of th, as in
thing and the. This conferred an air of
mystery to the page.
We were
encountering a language which seemd different from
English but similar to
German. What always happens, when one studies a
language, happened. Each one
of the words stood out as though it had
been carved, as though it were a
talisman. For that reason the poems of
a foreign language have a prestige
they do not enjoy in their own
language, for one hears, one sees, each one of
the words individually.
We think of the beauty, of the power, or simply of
the strangeness.