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Authors | Joe Milutis

Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington-Bothell. His interdisciplinary work includes experimental sound and radio; video works; new media; experimental narrative and poetics; theoretical writings; and various media and literature hybrids. He is the author, most recently, of Failure, A Writer’s Life and Bright Arrogance, a column on experimental translation at Jacket2. His writing has also appeared in Fence, Triple Canopy, Cabinet, Film Comment, Hyperallergic and Ctheory.

Articles on Amodern by Joe Milutis

TRANSLATIONAL GRANULARITY

What is the relation of translation to transmission? How does mechanical reproduction introduce the possibility of a translation that goes beyond alphabetism, into the realms of image and noise? As we see in W. G. Sebald’s use of Xeroxes, the granularity of a text, a form of utter specificity, is a sign of its existential untranslatability and an indication of the totality of mutation. This translational materiality neither requires dogmatic postmodernism, nor a return to presumably “humanist” bromides about fidelity to a text’s meaning.  Rather, an embrace of the imperfection inherent in a text’s transmission and reproducibility allows for a kind of superfidelity to the constantly shifting ground of translation.