HUMACHINE – IHMASIINA
Pasi Heikkurinen (texts / tekstit)
Risto Musta (images / kuvat)
Fullcolour photographs, bilingual
126 pages, size 170 x 230
ISBN 978-952-7256-21-3
Price 28,00 € (incl. delivery costs only in Finland)
Preface
According to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the so-called exosomatic turn was central to human history. With the gift of fire, and of course with the help of the language, man began to use and prepare tools that did not belong to him by birth. Even today, this turn distinguishes homo sapiens from other primates who mainly use their fingers and claws as primary instruments.
Of course, simple exosomatic tools such as canes and rocks can be found in the animal kingdom. It is not known, however, that other species would have developed anything like machines. The machine is not only a tool, but it also produces complex tools. Since the discovery of coal and oil, the number of machines has grown explosively.
Perhaps one of the most revolutionary machines of the present age is the Internet’s search engine. It finds and translates everything that is entered there.
Martin Heidegger said that everything changes when translated. Translation is not even possible. Does this mean that the machine creates something human does not? What does the machine do?
In this piece, we examine the relationship between man and machine with poetry-type text and photography. Where is the boundary between the machine and the human, if anywhere? The issue of translation is also a central, cross-cutting theme of the piece.
Each poem has a photograph, with one exception. In addition to the demarcation of man and machine, the reader can see how the images turn and do not turn into text.
The texts of the piece are presented in Finnish and English, so that translations can be compared easily. A bilingual reader can consider whether translation here is possible, under what conditions, and until what?
Translations have been conducted by Google Translate with human help.
The original language is naturally positioned first. |