Nik Davez
Sunday, 16 October 2011
Work from d PlsUR of d Txt.
“There are many different types of intelligence and this book aims to confuse anyone who holds on to our dusty, outdated academic assumptions. This book is an attempt at an Esperanto equivalent for our differing intelligences.” Nik DAvEz Text messaging has often been treated by our media and our culture like the droogs from Clockwork Orange are treated by the authorities: deviant vandalism, or ignorant youthful impulse. Some of the establishment views the mutated, condensed forms of this social media as ‘wrecking our language’. But support for this social phenomenon is developing, with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy recently proclaiming that poems were the original text messages, all of which help us distill our thoughts and feelings.
Of course this ‘distilling of thought’ and the accuracy that can entail has caused our view of academic writing and the philosophical work to become skewed. D PlsUR of d Txt aims to subvert and confuse these cultural assumptions through a work of collaborative translation. In this book artist Nik DavEz (Nick Davies) has undertaken a task in the lofty heights of academic translation, translating a book by Roland Barthes called The Pleasure of the Text into the demonized tongue of texters. But instead of concentrating on the nuances of the original authors intentions, the translation has been an anonymous online collaboration with other texters aiming to create a text more socially relevant to our contemporary lives. The original text has been translated through the use of transl8it.com, an online text speak database that web users can both add to and learn from. From here the rest of the more complex esoteric language was translated by hand before being inserted back into transl8it.com for any others users of the open forum to use (if they ever needed such ‘academic’ vocabulary!).
The result of this work is a book that confuses as much as it enlightens. It celebrates the ingenuity in both forms of language use, whilst bewildering anyone attempting to read it through a mix of Barthes’ esoteric words and the texters’ innovative condensing of characters…” – press release for d PlsUR of d Txt