Kaj misliš s tem? / What do you mean?

Kaj misliš s tem? / What do you mean?
Public preparation no.1 for an exhibition (Aksioma Oct. 2014)
Thursday, April 17th, 7.30pm,
Kult3000, Metelkova, Ljubljana

A performance and discussion with people who all had to learn a new language because they went living in a country who’s language they didn’t speak.

Performance initiator and preparation : Annie Abrahams. Invited participants : Martina Rusham (dancer and author, Austrian), Jana Wilcoxen (translator, project development, American), Chantal van Mourik (communicator, coordinator, Dutch). Discussion afterwards.

The performance (facilitated by CONA) will last 30 min.
We will not speak directly to one-another, we will type on a computer in our mother-tongue, use google to translate our text in Slovenian and then use text to speech software – TTS by Proteus – to be heard by all in Slovenian.

in the frame of (E)stranger : a 4 weeks residency invited by CONA
partners JSKD, French Institute Ljubljana

Images, etc from the performance: http://e-stranger.tumblr.com/post/83083792701/yesterday-at-kult3000-ljubljana-kaj-mislis-s-tem

Preparations :

Hi Chantal, Jana and Martina,

Two days to go … (email send yesterday)
It was very nice and interesting to have a preparation talk with all three of you individually, thanks a lot for that.

If possible it would be good if you can be at Kult3000, Metelkova 2/b at 18h30, so we would have one hour to calibrate the TTS, to get used to the interfaces, space and each other. (if you can come a bit earlier that would be better)

During the performance we will need to have three interfaces open:
– a collective writingpad in a browserwindow – we will use a special interface with passwords, I will send you your codes tomorrow in an individual mail.
– another browserwindow with googletranslation open – I noticed the Dutch – Slovenian is worse than the English – Slovenian
– the proteus Text to Speech TTS interface

We will write on the pad in our mothertongue (one phrase at a time) – we copy that phrase to google translate, we will copy the translated phrase in the TTS.

We will all start with a variation on something like :
I am Annie Abrahams, my mothertongue is Dutch.
I live in France and learned French.
I felt confortable speaking French after 12 years …

We will have prepared each a few phrases (minimum of three) that we can use.
We can react to what we see or hear what the others write, we can confirm, repeat, deny, change the subject.
We always use our mothertongue, we won’t say a word, we won’t interact outside of this strange communication protocol. We won’t be able to do a regular discussion, we know it and we shouldn’t try to do that, let’s think of it more as a quartet with 4 voices (male voices, how strange that will be :) is the foreign voice a male voice? a fathertongue?)

It will last 30 minutes ( let’s ask Brane to cut the sounds/deconnect the speakers as a stop sign)

email Annie Abrahams 15 04 2014

Filed under: performance, (E)stranger, CONA, discussion, Kult3000