Tyler Coburn (USA) will be performing I’m that angel in HomeShop at 7 pm on Saturday, August 3rd. The language of performance will be English.

“I’m that angel is a cycle of writings and performances that explore the conditions of how we work on and against the computer, narrated from the perspective of a “content farmer”: an emergent type of online journalist contracted to generate articles based on words peaking in Google Trends.” —Tyler Coburn

八月三日下午7时，泰勒科伯恩（美国）将在家作坊做《我是那个天使》行为艺术表演。工作语言：英语。 “我是天使”是一个系列写作和行为艺术，探讨我们是如何用电脑工作又对其充满无奈的状态。从一个“时文佃户”的视角来叙述：一种新兴网络记者，受雇于人，以谷歌高频词为基础生成文章。

泰勒科伯恩(出生1983年,紐約市),長年在纽约市發展,具有藝術家和作家背景。 他獲得耶魯大學的比較文學文學士以及洛杉磯南加州大學美 術碩士。
科伯恩的作品已在倫 敦當代藝術院以及惠特尼美國藝術博物館、安特衛普和紐約的雕塑中心展示。

《革命将至 L’insurrection qui vient》, donated by 蔡凯 CAI Kai

Recent acquisitions inadvertently parallel other discussions we’ve been having lately, or trying to have, a discussion about the discussion. Sometimes things feel a bit removed, like translators talking about translation, and either we get so entrenched in our own discourses that we never reach consensus, or we play multimedia-like because we cannot escape certain distancing from ourselves.

《The Anarchist Cookbook》, donated by 蔡凯 CAI Kai

After a long split, the anarchists find one another again in commiseration for their loneliness.

《香港投诉合唱团 Complaints Choir of Hong Kong》, donated by 麦巅 MAI Dian  (By coincidence, view the first mainland edition in the form of the “北京有机农夫市集吐槽歌会第一波 Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market Spitting Trough Singing Party“, premiering Saturday, 26 November)

There is a triangle here, let’s not call it love just yet, between art and language and activism—one moving each through another—but we have yet to place our subjectivities within them, even if we could say that it is our intention to implicate every stage of an aesthetico-political engagement. But here, in a system where all negotiations have been cut, “what kind of association is enough?” To 上访, to self-immolate or to break out in violence are not so much about negotiation as much as flailing demonstration, so it becomes difficult to see the usefulness of an explanation of the systemics at work, and how many people does the activist have to convince anyway before we could find ourselves on even ground?

“I am not sure I know how to how politics,” the artist tells the poet. We lose ourselves in μετά. Translation and translation and translation, activism cannot escape its traps, art indulges. And yet, in commiseration for our loneliness, he mumbles quietly to me today, “我们的本地文化是什么?” Yes, we had lost ourselves over assertions, growing nations, a new space. So I’m wondering if we can go back to simple observations again, the concrete of “the good life”, another consideration of locality. Productivity (…art and language and activism…) is difficult amidst rough re-identification, but we’re thrown again, teenage angst, the revelation of freedom. The results are not external to good will, or the intention in aiming, but as the old saying goes: “Do what you must, come what may.”

木扇 wooden fan, donated by Fotini LAZARIDOU-HATZIGOGA

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Even if you don’t understand my writing, the above pictured objects and less than 10,000 other items are available for lending from the HomeShop library/10,000 Item Treasury. Please drop by to browse the collection.

大胡叔叔跟英语母语的Orianna和汉语母语的王尘尘  Happy customer Uncle Long beard with native English speaker Orianna and native Chinese speaker Cici

工作样本 Work samples:

包子，油条，多肉多油 buns, fried doughsticks, meat heavy

金鱼，蝌蚪，多多蔬菜 goldfish, tadpole, lots of veg

简体介绍 Simplified version:

我们的翻译为您的：学术／非学术的目的、展示自己的目的（比如简历、媒体发布会等等）、乐趣以及轻微颠覆性的目的提供服务。可译语言：汉语、英语、蒙古语、意大利语、希腊语、日语。价格面议，边喝边聊。有意者请联系： lianxi@homeshop.org.cn

Translation services for academic and non-academic purposes, forms of representation, fun and/or mild subversion. Languages offered, in most directions to and from: Chinese, English, Mongolian, Italian, Greek, Japanese. Reasonable rates. Please contact lianxi[at]homeshop[dot]org[cn] for inquiries.

Meta:

There are a few key figures that epitomise the zeitgeist, I think a few of you had speculated before, or at least sportsbabel and i on occasion, certain roles that have risen out of growing demand and/or fissures in the system, and next to the agents and hackers (more recent developments may also point to the rioter), we have not yet expounded upon the gentle maneuverings of the translator and acts of translation. Unlike many other things that we may so firmly believe in, like science, the happiness of fish or what is good and right, translation can only be based in the unconfirmable absolute, only the hearsay of peers who may deem you faithful enough, lying in a gap, what can only be roughly trustable by the ones in power who hire you.

And you? Just make sure you get paid 50% up front, and what have you got to lose? The translator is servant, perhaps, but these days we all know games of wit and cunning go far beyond elementary economics. We are at your service, and maybe even where it is not written in red chalk, there is a small feeling of up rising that we say maybe you should just go ahead and overlook, 嘿嘿… The translator is most efficacious the more imperceptibly he/she fits into the conversation, yet always with relation to listeners and foremost, the act of listening. The translator’s voice, according to a certain ethics, should remain as quiet as possible, such that written and spoken words are shared in as large a ratio of sound to original meaning as possible. And while we must acknowledge the impossibility of a 1:1, perse, it is in the multitude of fractions there below that we come upon all the real uncertainties at hand: the betrayal of context, incoherency, nervous laughter here and there.

The elitism of bilingualism should always be countered in light of such inevitable failure, as we can never learn enough, and its power always rests upon a precipice of meaning gone astray. These measures of maneuverability and risk characterise all of our leading players (see the recent Žižek article for more thoughts on the rioter), though intent and affect vary to extremes. Among them, it seems possible that it is the translator who may strive for invisibility to the greatest degree—as opposed to the hacker who must remain anonymous as author but strives for the greatest possible effect, and the agent whose effects may not remain but must work productively as a skimmer of surplus, facilitating and enhancing the means towards an end. A sense of value judgement should perhaps never predicate the translator’s work, but as per any freelancer’s dilemma, we must be able to bear it, at least, and especially in the case of literature, be able to find the aesthetics appropriate to certain affects in their original form. To find an aesthetics without judgement is crucial here—paradoxes notwithstanding… a case for the tensions between aesthetics and invisibility made active in a course of doing, creating. Work, motherfucker, work.