Translation, transmutation, transmediation and transmission in TRANSMIISSION [A DIALOGUE]

This paper interrogates translation as a mode of creation and dissemination in one recent work of electronic literature, TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]. To do this, translation is situated within the broader context of a string of trans variables: var trans=[lation, mutation, mediation, mission]. Trans- is a prefix meaning across, beyond, through. -lation comes from the Latin, borne, as in carried, or endured. In the translation of born-digital texts from one code language to another, what precisely is borne across, beyond, or through?

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is a transmutation of Nick Montfort’s The Two, a narrative text generator written first in Python and then translated to JavaScript by Montfort in 2008. Though the nature and form of Montfort’s narrative were substantially transformed in the creation of the Python version of TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE], and then further in the translation of the transmutation into JavaScript, something of the uncanny twinning of characters at work in The Two underpinned the process. This is a result of an operation of memory. In JavaScript, var= refers to a space in memory. Though a function choose(array) might be called upon to choose(trans), only one result will be returned. The rest remain in memory, as potential translations. This computer-generated text performs the act of selection from memory. Every 80000 milliseconds a new instance, one of an infinite number of possible translations, is displayed. The text displayed is doubly a translation, performed in the first instance by the JavaScript and in the second by the browser, which translates the source code into what we see on the screen. Further, text itself is about the translation from one place to another. var place=['Canada', 'England', 'Nova Scotia', 'Cape Breton', etc.]. Were this work to be translated into French, we might see: var place=[‘Canada’, ‘France’, ‘Acadie’, ‘Quebec’, etc.].

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] performs the transmediation of texts from archival sources that have already have passed across, beyond or through the code mediums of wires, switches, signals, air, ears, hands, paper. var receiving= for example, reproduces shorthand gleaned from logs kept at the Glace Bay Marconi Station, circa 1911: ['a few scraps of a private message', 'distinguishable dots', 'heavy traffic', 'something again', 'atmospherics', 'repeated \"are you there\"', 'a weak signal', 'no answers to our inquiries', 'no signals', 'strong readable signals, sending fast', 'some static', 'lightening all around'].

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is also a transmission. One JavaScript file which sits in one directory on one server attached to a vast network of hubs, routers, switches, and submarine cables through which this one file may be accessed many times from many places by many devices. Each time this JavaScript is called, the network, the browser, and the client-side CPU conspire to respond with a new iteration. The mission of the JavaScript source code is to generate another sort of script, a dialogue to be read aloud in three voices: Call, Response, and Interference, the live performance offering yet another reading across, beyond or through this text.