Simultaneous translation / Traducció simultània, an exhibition by Eloi Puig, will open at the Highland Institute for Contemporary Art on Sunday 8 July, 2012, 2-5pm.

The exhibition considers the relation of art and science and the difficulties in translating ideas from one to the other. By making a live connection from the physical and geographic location of HICA, to Hangar, a centre for arts production and research in Barcelona, the city in which Puig lives and works, he presents an equivalent dialogue through which ideas of translation may be explored.

A performance on the opening day (Sunday 8 July) will establish this dialogue, enacting various translations simultaneously between HICA and Hangar, via the internet: Photographic images and poetic texts directly related to each specific location will be variously encoded and deciphered, obtaining data sequences which, transmitted on-line, are presented as equivalents to the source materials’ DNA. An experiment in the unification of geographically distant points, the analysis of this ‘DNA’ further enables Puig to conduct a comparison of place as sequence alignment, following the scientific methods of bioinformatics and computational genomics. The comparison will generate new ways of seeing and understanding the source materials, as image and information, and explore the reality of concurrency as something disruptive to our individual sense of personal narrative, and our narratives of place.

Throughout his work Puig considers whether language, and art, through their conceptual separation from reality, unavoidably manipulate ‘fact’. He specifically draws parallels between human bodies and minds, and the physical components of computers and the virtual states they create, asking whether the ‘language’ of computers might be similarly afflicted. To this end, his works have created corrupted computer data to be endlessly repeated, or randomly generating computer programmes with no input possible from the user. He has further incorporated manifestations of the real and fake, through such disparate sources as Instants, a poem purportedly written by Jorge Luis Borges, the fake pop group Milli Vanilli, and the TV documentary Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?

A specialist in computer-art and digital printing, Puig is Professor in the Department of Painting at the University of Barcelona, and a member of the Imarte research group. He held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Akademie der Künste München Bildenden, through 2008, and his exhibitions include Gallery Ferran Cano (Palma de Mallorca and Barcelona), I8 (Reykjavik), I.Bongard (Paris), Cavecanem (Seville), with other audiovisual projects including the CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), SonarCinema at CCCB, Mostra d’Arts Electroniques 2000, and CASM (Barcelona).

Simultaneous translation / Traducció simultània runs from 8 July – 12 August, and is open on Sundays 2 – 5pm, or by appointment.

HICA, Dalcrombie, Loch Ruthven, Dores, Inverness-shire, IV2 6UA, UK

T: +44 (0)1808-521-306 info@h-i-c-a.org  www.h-i-c-a.org  

Source: h-i-c-a