Performance artist Daniela Sneppova’s text transmute has been published in the online journal ephemera as an interactive reading / translating experience. The following introduces the essay of her process oriented experiment – showing an understanding of the performative in general as an active communicative process. It is an awareness of laborating on various level of any performative action along and across borderlines, exploring what may be defined as failures in a viceversa movement as ‘the invisibility of absence’. (transmute online project needs shockwave player)
… This textual representation moves between the inspiration – the triggers that led to the creation of the performance – and a description of what the audience participated in. The blacked out, missing text performs a number of functions. It refers to the acts of censorship by many Eastern European countries before the fall of Communism: Censors frequently obscured words or phrases in personal correspondence sent between nations, families and friends. The missing text also seeks to reproduce the gaps and silences of translation. It is difficult to discern what is left out of a translation. We take for granted that what is missing from a translated text. However, I am interested in the cumulative effects of these ‘minor’ absences. Thus the invisibility of absence is something that is explored in the on-line project. The on-line project offers a different kind of text with which the user must actively engage; an environment of sound and images that responds to mouse movements and clicks. The blacked out text is meant to remind readers of the on-line dimension of this project. Readers will always make connections when reading any text; in this article that process is exaggerated, encouraging readers to ‘fill in the blanks.’ … (link)
