Category: Methods of Translating

Week 1 Typography Script

Week 2 Hybridizing

Final Publication

In this unit, I translated a film fragment into a publication, exploring how form reshapes meaning. Using the same approach, I reinterpreted Alessandro Ludovico’s Post-Digital Print: A Future Scenario through 2 methods from Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Ludovico’s essay on the coexistence of analogue and digital meets Queneau’s method of variation and repetition. By filtering one through the other, this written response transforms argument into rhythm, treating translation as a process of reformation rather than substitution.

The dilemma of print in the digital era materialises as the tension between analogue and digital transitions. Instead of a binary opposition, they interlace—entering a phase of hybridity and redefinition. Unlike music or video, which act as intermediary carriers, print is the display itself. It holds gestures, complexity, and cultural depth. The page carries its own grammar of touch; punctuation is defined by weight, texture, and time. In contrast, digital publishing speaks the syntax of connection. Together, they form a composite sentence where clauses of paper and code alternate. Decentralised, community-based DIY publishing emerges in response, forming an analogue-like network in which each zine is a node, each exchange a packet of cultural data (Ludovico, 2012, pp.154). As digital and print converge, their syntax merges into “the first true hybrids” (Ludovico, 2012, pp.156). Here, translation becomes notation—a tracing of transformation, a record of shifting media—reading itself rewritten as a rhythmic interface between the tangible and the networked. Though current hybrids remain at a consumer level, they foreshadow a processual and remix-driven post-digital publishing to come.

Print drifts through the post-digital sea like a jellyfish—transparent, slow, catching light. Around it, signals move like currents, brushing against its soft edges. “There is no one-way street from analogue to digital,” (Ludovico, 2012, pp.153). The screen flickers above like sunlight on water; the page moves beneath, patient and full of memory. Sometimes they touch—reflection meeting texture.

In this tide, mushrooms begin to grow in forgotten corners of print: zines, small presses, handmade books. They feed on the remains of pixels, transforming what was once consumed by speed into quiet persistence. The forest of publishing becomes damp and alive again, each spore a story, each page a breath.

Print does not vanish into the digital; it floats within it, faintly glowing. Between paper and screen, between drift and growth, new forms pulse. Their bodies are fragile, but they continue to regenerate—each cycle a slow translation between one medium and another.

Reference

Queneau, R. (1998) Exercises in Style. London: John Calder. [First published 1947], pp. 9–16, 19–26.

Ludovico, A. (2012) ‘Post-Digital Print: A Future Scenario’ and ‘Print vs. Electrons’, in Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894. Eindhoven: Onomatopee, pp. 153–161.