Hello!

Mute / Color / HD / PAL

29’40”

2010

Time of creation: from March 18th 2010 to April 29th

1. Lynn and Xiaofei sent e-mails to each other and translated them by Google translators during one months. The contents of the e-mails are freely decided in the process of communication.


2. The presentation of the work has two parts, English and Chinese

a. English part: the original English mails that Lynn sent to Xiaofei and the translated mails that Xiaofei sent to Lynn. Texts will be shown as rolling text on the screen.

b. Chinese part: the original Chinese mails that Xiaofei sent to Lynn and the translated mails that Lynn sent to Xiaofei. Texts will be shown as static video on the screen.

https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/descriptive-acts/

Lynn  Marie Kirby and Li Xiaofei’s Diary (2010), a two-channel silent video projection, documents an email exchange over the course of a month at a time when Google was blocked from being accessed in China. The double projection with one series of responses in English and the other in Chinese has undergone an act of translation using the publicly available Google translation software. The resulting conversation is one sided for most people unless they read English and Mandarin. The work thus triggers a sense of gaps, delays, misinterpretations but also a sense of unexpected poetry in the communication process. Ultimately, the work describes also its own coming into being.