The Grain of Language / (The Typist)
​performance at 4C Gallery, Los Angeles, Jan. 19th, 2025
Language breathes in sound. It carries weight, rhythm, and silence—before it is understood, before it is spoken.
​
A Max/MSP patch I developed listens, translates, and reimagines: speech becomes binary, binary becomes rhythm, and rhythm becomes music. Each letter is converted into eight numbers of 0s and 1s, where 1 is sound and 0 is silence. In this raw, digital transformation, text is stripped of its meaning—yet its grain, rhythm, and materiality remain, taking on an entirely new form.
​
For Jiayun Chen’s solo exhibition opening, I performed a live typing experience of Jabberwocky, a poem already untethered from conventional meaning in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland universe. Through my system, it underwent a second metamorphosis—not only across languages but across sonic structures.
Each translation was mapped onto a distinct sonic architecture, preserving traces of meaning while reshaping its form. As syllables scattered, reformed, and collided, the poem ceased to be mere text. It became a body of sound, where translation was not a loss, but a transformation—where meaning was not dissolved, but reimagined as music.
This work explores the tension within translation, the friction between meaning and abstraction, and the magic that emerges in its transformation.