Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Translation Island
Lulu Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE
“Translation Island” consists of ten audiovisual artworks transform Lulu Island, an island just offshore from downtown Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Visitors to the exhibition walk a two kilometre-long lit path inside the island, alongside sand dunes, desert flora, beaches, and fresh water lakes.
The project was commissioned by Abu Dhabi’s Department for Culture and Tourism for the new MANAR light Festival, and it is a conceptual “ode to translation”, which the artist understands as the rendering of one language into another and the relocation of a subject in space.
The installations on view use technologies such as AI, computer vision, environmental sensors, and 3D mapping to create poetic shared experiences in a desert landscape.
“Collider,” for instance, detects invisible cosmic radiation arriving on Earth from stars and black holes, translating the radiation and making it visible as gentle ripples along a colossal curtain of light that can be seen from a 10-kilometre radius. Other works such as “Thermal Drift”, “Dune Ringers”, and “Pulse Island” realize biometric signatures like body temperature, voice, and heartbeat, using projection mapping and fields of glimmering lightbulbs.
Several installations are literally live translations of language. “Translation Stream” is a fluid stream of letters projected onto the sandy trail, which organize themselves around visitors, revealing the poetry of contemporary Emirati poets Nujoom Alghanem, Khalid Albudoor, and Adel Khozam, in both English and Arabic.  “Shadow Tuner” allows visitors to use their shadow to tune in up to 12,000 live streams of radio from around the world, and “Translation Lake” uses AI voice avatars to endlessly translate James Joyce’s recondite masterpiece “Finnegan’s Wake” into 24 languages, celebrating the impossibility of fluid machine translation of complex human literature.
Each of these works engage and play within a long history – from the Tower of Babel to the Library of Alexandria, from the House of Wisdom of the Abbasid era to the Toledo School of Translators, and now through the automation afforded by artificial intelligence and machine learning – of how we express ourselves and make embodied meaning together while finding both uncertainty and solace in that which remains untranslatable.
