The Translation project and section of the festival brings together a bunch of artists who cast a magpie’s eye over everyday culture and change it, (sometimes radically, sometimes barely at all), to create inquisitive and ingenious, inspired and sometimes pretty radical sound and music, text and language. Running all the way through 20th C avant-thought there’s a trend of appropriation, of giving something that many people at the time would consider to have no artistic value a voice, a locus in art.  Think about Pierre Henry’s re-thinking of everyday sounds as musique concrete.  Or how about John Oswald’s plunderphonics (an anti-copyright two fingered salute to corporate America via “electroquotations” of Michael Jackson and U2), or even Warhol’s appropriation of pop culture icons and mass production as high art.

Translation might involve anything from a NYC radio station’s weather reports retooled as poetry, to every performance (and your own reactions to it) at the festival so far transformed into densely layered hard-assed noise and musical overload. Potentially confusing or confusingly full of potential?

Conceived with Craig Douglas Dworkin