The Sylphs
The Sylphs proposes a new form of literary translation, asking: What’s at stake when language becomes literal via the visual?
This work is from Ana María Caballero’s Being Borges series, which takes Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings (a vast compendium of humanity’s imagined creatures) and its translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni as points of departure from which to explore how AI interprets Spanish versus English text, unmasking biases ingrained in large data sets.
This 12-part collection delves into the impossibility of translation. AI cannot “read” Spanish and English the same way because they are different sign systems, with nuances that exist beyond their constructed signifiers, their words.
By presenting words beside the suite of images they generate, The Sylphs invites viewers to experience language as a transdisciplinary work of art, one whose meanings reverberate past their established systems of signification.
Caballero’s process was three-fold. She first used Borges and Guerrero’s Spanish descriptions of imaginary beings as prompts to create a large corpus of images, from which a main image and a secondary one are selected. The process is repeated using di Giovanni’s English translations.
Caballero purposefully uses a public, widely available AI model, seeking to tease out current culturally ingrained preconceptions.
Then, Caballero writes a new poem, an inspired recasting of the original Spanish text, and uses this poem to create an additional compendium of images.
Her poems delve into the poetics of prompts, incorporating text-to-image generation syntax in their construction.
No additional words or punctuation marks are used other than Borges and Guerrero’s, di Giovanni’s and her own, thus each image represents a literal translation of the texts.
Caballero then triangulates the images via a collage where shared signification and striking contrast are underpinned by excerpts from the source texts that created the images.