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forms of being
March 7, 2011
Dorothee Lang is a writer, web freelancer and traveller, and the editor of BluePrintReview. She lives in Germany, and has always been fascinated by words and the way they change in different countries. Recent projects include the launch of >language >place, an open, collaborative blog project. For more about her, visit her at blueprint21.de.
Categories: Translation
Dorothee Lang
qarrtsiluni 
great to see this included in the “translations” issue! the idea was to create a collage that includes different layers of “forms of being” – the different shapes of architecture and landscape, and the different “shape” of languages.
i just added some notes on the collage (and especially on the Chinese words, and the complexity of language) in a blog note, here: http://virtual-notes.blogspot.com/2011/03/forms-of-being.html
this has so many dimensions and such depth, especially continuing on to the notes and the animated version. a provocative and playful addition to the translation theme!
The still version is stunning and complex as is. Once the words and images are in motion, that complexity multiplies and, as Steve says, takes on so many new dimensions. Such an interesting project!
This is so cool!
I hope it was sufficiently clear to all readers that the flash animation is an animation of the still pictures, not a link to something additional. I think I may only have realised this because I’m familiar with some of Dorothee’s other work.
Hey Dorothee,
My piece is March 9th (two days after you! Nice to see your work here. I’m really pleased to be part of this fabulous issue.
Best,
Lynne Shapiro
thanks for your feedback! glad you enjoyed this play with conjugations and places.
a thought i had yesterday: “forms of being” is also a meditation on learning languages, with the repeated conjugation of verb forms. and interestingly, learning our mother language worked completely different. no conjugations, no grammar lessons, no dictionary. how do our brains learn languages?
Thank you, Dorothee it’s beautiful! I highly recommend Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, particularly the early chapter on the grammatic distinction between pidgin or patois and fully creolized languages. Apparently we humans, our brains, are born with language or grammatic structure. http://bit.ly/eV4TOG, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creolized