Trans(ference/lation/ition)

To who or what does “Space Invaders” appeal? It’s a simple question, yet also completely unanswerable. First, one must ask which space invaders? Are the capitals important? Do I refer to the 1978 arcade box? The individual sprites coming down eternally? The nihilistic fight that is playing a game that cannot be won? Or perhaps it’s one of the related text/objects? Perhaps its the Retro Sabotage flash game that shows this impossibility? Or one of the many web, or portable remakes, perhaps Taito’s 2009 Infinity Gene? Or might I be referring to the street/game artist of the same name who places the pixelated characters in city spaces around the world? In a simple answer to what should be a simple question, I’ll simply say I refer to all at once, because that’s how such intertextuality works. There is an original, but it may not be the important point. They all, after a certain point, refer to each other.

This meandering began when a friend mentioned photographing invaders. As she studies street art the first guess is that she was talking about the artist and said artist’s creations, but when I then went to find some sort of image to confirm this (searching for invaders without effort; catching aliens by picture). I opened an entirely different can of worms, or, to follow what soon will be an unwieldy metaphor, a new wave lining up at the top of the screen. However, at the end of this meandering I realized that it’s all the same interwoven meaning.

Invader’s website has a global listing of invaded cities. They are places where works exist, but San Diego, the city in which I live and my friend was catching aliens, is not there. One answer is that the site has not been updated, but it will be soon. Following this meaning the list becomes a sort of status. Which cities are good enough to be graced by the artist’s work.

People on the Yelp forum discussing the artwork certainly point to this: whether the work is fake or not (another answer to San Diego’s lack of appearance on the list), how San Diego has gained this honor (the street art exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art), and that the city has become “bona fide, betches” (Yelp user). Status is certainly tied up in the meaning of Invader’s space invaders. However, there are other meanings of the work: the game, nostalgia, migration and aliens. All of these are tied in the work and the general resurface and re-imagining of meaning.

Space Invaders holds a special place in the 20-40 year old generations as one of the early cabinet games of the golden age of gaming. Like most golden age games such as Donkey Kong, there are memorable characters, but unlike Donkey Kong‘s Jump Man, who was reborn as Mario, Space Invaders‘ player character is rather unmemorable. While Space Invaders had sequels, they are barely remembered. It’s hard to start a franchise when the plot and player are destined for death. However, Space Invaders did start a genre. Hundreds of shooter games followed with equally unmemorable player characters, but ironically these generally had forgettable enemies as well. What Space Invaders did was create a long chain of names, signifiers (1942, R-Type, Gradius, etc), that all pointed back to the original signified, Space Invaders, and its memorable, invading army.

The game has thus remained in cultural memory, to be sparked with each further generic horse beating, as the eternal good fight against an unnamed (but memorable) enemy. However, the past few years have brought a different resurgence. From genre and allusion back to direct reference. The retro/nostalgic trend of the 2000s has brought with it hosts of remakes and demakes, remixes and repositionings. André the Giant becomes a poster-boy for frat boys, Obama spells hope for the masses, beautifully relaxing Mario Clouds float by on a hacked ROM, and Space Invaders goes contemporary political commentary with its pixellated enemy sprites.

Invader’s invaders work on multiple levels. They refer back to the nostalgia of the 1970s and its memorable characters, but they also tie into fears of global migration/movement (invasion if you will) prevalent at the current moment. The invaders are aliens, the same as the “illegals” in the U.S. news and political media. They come in, attack, kill, take over the planet, and of course steal jobs, but they’re so memorable, bordering on cute. Wait, that didn’t come out right, or did it?

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries human movement over borders has reached an unprecedented high if only because the borders have become more pronounced. An equal amount of movement has always existed, small distances, long distances when borders were less national and less guarded, but not as they are now: pronounced, fenced, and racial/nationalistic. What might have been normal movement has become illegal border crossing, and those who cross become illegals. Aliens. Invaders.

Invader’s work is about merging the current fear of the illegal (in play with the original game, all of the generic follows and almost all games in general – particularly the link to Arabs/aliens in most modern FPS games is troubling and obvious) with the loving nostalgia of the past. People like these invaders, but it goes a step further. As the Yelpers demonstrated, invaders make a city. Where at one point it was a skyscraper, a sports team, or a museum, now it is an invader. A city has made it when it has been invaded.

But am I talking about space invaders or illegals right now? Are they?

• Invader. Space Invaders. Accessed online June 17, 2010. <http://www.space-invaders.com/>
• Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Viva la Revolucion: A Dialogue with Urban Landscape. Accessed online June 17, 2010. <http://www.mcasd.org/exhibitions/616/viva-la-revolucion>
• Retro Sabotage: A Strange Kind of Love. Target: Space Invaders: Invasion. <http://www.retrosabotage.com/spacein/invasion.html>
• Yelp. “Space Invader San Diego.” Accessed online June 17, 2010. <http://www.yelp.com/topic/san-diego-space-invader>

While I advocate for particular strategies and theories of translation, I do so in the historical context of 21st century US sociopolitical irresponsibility and dominance.

I do not speak as a minority, nor as a reader of a language fighting for survival and self determination. Rather, I write as an early 21st century US citizen who has seen ‘his’ country at war for a decade. A decade where significant backlash has resulted against people who look or act different regardless of their relationship to the ‘enemy.’

The US has fought the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq against an undefined terrorist that can best be summed up as ‘different.’ America is at war with difference: “those who oppose our way of life.” And one of the (many) ways this insane fear of, and aggression against, the cultural other has been reproduced to massive levels has been in the systematic representation of the other through and in translation.

A simple result of the discursive regime of domesticating translation (Venuti) is that everybody else – the foreign in books and other media – looks like us. As all translation, all media made by anybody else, is made to look as if it were made by us, we never see difference. All that is good looks like us. All it then takes is the mass display not only of difference, but difference that “hates us,” to spark 10 years of war.

I believe I do not overemphasize the importance of changing the way translation happens in the US.

• Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008 [1994].
• —. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. New York: Routledge, 1998.

As I read Jonathan Culler’s Ferdinand de Saussure, the difference between editors and translators is striking. Or rather, their similarity and yet complete perceived difference is striking.

In chapter one Culler notes, “Most teachers would shudder at the thought of having their views handed on in this way, and it is indeed extraordinary that this unpromising procedure, fraught with possibilities of misunderstanding and compromise, should have produced a major work” (Culler p. 25).  He then ends the chapter with the claim that he “shall not hesitate to rectify the original editors’ occasional lapses” (Culler p. 26).

Saussure is the origination point of the Course in General Linguistics. Nobody questions this. However, what of the status of Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, the “editors” to which Culler refers? Saussure’s colleagues, Bally and Sechehaye, gathered three terms’ worth of students’ notes, combined them, ordered them, limited them and in so doing made the Course. Culler calls them editors, and yet could he not also call them translators? What really is the difference?

Bally and Sechehaye are forgiven for their mistakes and counted as a problematic (but necessary) medium from Saussure to air to students to notes to editors. As such, Culler has no qualms about correcting their “lapses.” But how is this any different in the case of Wade Baskin, the English translator of the French original, or any other translator?

An editor is somebody that changes something for the benefit of general understanding. Editors are hated and partially antagonistic to the idea of the author, but are also considered a necessary part of the process. A translator is somebody that changes a text into a different form: it is not for general benefit, but specific benefit to a particular audience, whether that be temporally or spatially separated from the origin. In this case, Saussure in French… and in his classrooms between 1907 and 1911.

So, the Course is a translation of Saussure’s lectures just as the English translation of the Course In General Linguistics is a translation of a translation. And yet they aren’t considered as such, there is an assumed difference between the editors and the translators. Editing is different from translating.

But this makes little sense. They all move the text on, allow it to live, but necessarily alter it.

The conference Digital Arts and Culture is meant to combine various people from various fields in order to talk and work. It’s interdisciplinary. It also seems to combine people who are in multiple disciplines. It’s multidisciplinary. Unfortunately, the result has similar pitfalls to the standard woes of disciplines. Namely: a) you go to what you know b) there are multiple sessions at any given time c) these sessions roughly break down into humanities, arts and computer science. These three end up meaning that the three groupings have much more limited interaction than might otherwise happen.

I have two examples to elaborate.

1.

On the first day there was a panel on Software Studies. In it Aden Evens gave a talk on Programming and Fold (or Edge as he changed it to). The talk was interesting, but it was to a room filled with programmers who were mumbling and stirring in anger during the first half of his talk saying “wrong wrong WRONG!” to themselves and each other. This was offset by the second half when all of the sudden something clicked and they suddenly became interesting as he moved to the second part that he was trying to connect. However, the q/a consisted primarily of people taking him to task for various ways

Now, there are two things that are important here. Aden Evens is, apparently, a humanistist (yes, it’s a clunky word and there might be something better). He has time spent coding, so he’s done his work enough to talk about the programming side and, importantly, present on a panel that’s slightly more focused on the programming side. The second is that he was largely alone in that room as his fellow humanitists were likely off in the embodiment and performance session.

The result is that the two sides did not really interact and the place where they did interact was as if in enemy territory. Even though there was discussion, it was slightly at odds.

2.

The second example is when I presented on the second day. My own talk had been accepted in both the Future of Humanist Inquiry (humanitist) and Software Studies (programmers) sections, but for various reasons I went with the Software Studies side. At my panel there were four people:

• Scholarly civilization: utilizing 4X gaming as a framework for humanities digital media
  [Elijah Meeks, University of California, Merced]
• Shaping stories and building worlds on interactive fiction platforms
  [Alex Mitchell, Communications and New Media Programme, National University of Singapore]
  [Nick Montfort, Massachusets Institute of Technology]
• Translation (is) not localization: language in gaming
  [Stephen Mandiberg, University of California, San Diego]
• Seriality, the Literary and Database in Homestar Runner: Some Old Issues in New Media
  [Stephanie Boluk, Department of English, University of Florida]

Of note is that my panel consists of one “refuge from the humanities theme,” one critical geographer, myself (who chose this option and tailored intendingly), and a cs oriented twosome doing slightly more typically programmer things.

The result (and the opposite of the first example) is that questions and discussion was geared completely toward the programming talk. There were some humanitists in the room (I saw them) but they all tended to leave to go in and out. Of the 20 minutes of Q/A 18 or so were discussion about the IF presentation. No questions went to the critical geographer. Now, this might be considered a matter of bitching, but i’m really trying to say it’s a matter of disconnect.

For instance, one of the lines of questions into the IF discussion was focused on the movement and particularities of platforms, programming and possibilities of moving between platforms. This is localization, the exact topic that I had been discussing and in a very similar way to which I had been discussing. So similar, in fact, that the chair and I had a glance at eachother before I felt the need to jump in and point out some of the problems with what they were discussing. This is discussion as it should be, yes, but it is also disconnect that the completely obvious link.

DAC then is interdisciplinary, fine. But it’s also very fragmented by the mentality of doing what’s comfortable, going to the talks that you know, and of course, mingling with the people who are like you.