{"id":1180,"date":"2015-11-01T19:58:02","date_gmt":"2015-11-01T17:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/?p=1180"},"modified":"2023-04-04T12:39:05","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T10:39:05","slug":"gregor-weichbrodt-no-offense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/gregor-weichbrodt-no-offense\/","title":{"rendered":"Gregor Weichbrodt: No Offense"},"content":{"rendered":"

A version of this essay was included in the program accompanying Gregor Weichbrodt\u2019s salon at Room & Board<\/a> on October 29, 2015. Julia Pelta Feldman is the director of Room & Board, an artist\u2019s residency in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n

Gregor Weichbrodt recently visited a friend\u2019s apartment in Berlin, the city where he lives (a short train ride from Potsdam, where he was born). He knew that this friend often hosts international guests, but Weichbrodt, finding the apartment\u2019s contents labeled with their own names, was nonetheless struck by a feeling of disorientation. Der K\u00fchlschrank <\/em>on the refrigerator; die Wand<\/em> on the wall: of course, these words were there to help visitors learn German, but for Weichbrodt, a native speaker, the experience had a surreal quality: the redundant explanations served to estrange him from these familiar, domestic things.
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I had not properly appreciated Weichbrodt\u2019s feeling of discombobulation at finding himself here in New York until he proposed applying the same treatment to the apartment that comprises Room & Board, where he has been artist-in-residence this month. He has learned a few new English words in the process, but the primary goal is not to orient him, but rather to disorient everyone else: to communicate his experience of estrangement in the face of gratuitous obviousness. In doing so, he both allows native English speakers to feel like strangers on our own soil and reminds us of his own constant awareness that he does not belong here. (Weichbrodt has a habit, when some minor error in his English is corrected, of saying \u201cSorry.\u201d That he is both genuinely abashed and aware that he needn\u2019t be is suggested by the fact that he has lately escalated this practice to pre-emptive atonement, apologetically explaining, \u201cI\u2019m German \u2013 no offense.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The verbal redundancy of the labels makes the perfect cognitive hors d’oeuvre for Weichbrodt\u2019s work, which often makes too much sense and too little all at once. As in his encounter with the labeled apartment, it\u2019s not in language\u2019s foreignness but in its familiarity that we find the bizarre. That is precisely where Apollinaire\u2019s sense of une sorte de surr\u00e9alisme<\/em> originates, not to mention most jokes.<\/p>\n

Still, it surprised me that Weichbrodt sought to share a personal experience. Even in his native tongue, he is not given to foregrounding his own subjectivity. In fact, in his work \u2013 much of which takes the form of an insistent first-person perspective \u2013 he avoids it entirely. This is especially true of his English texts, for whose qualities he is only partly responsible.<\/p>\n

My first interaction with Weichbrodt was online. For his book I Don\u2019t Know<\/a><\/em>, released earlier this year, Weichbrodt needed the assistance of native English speakers to suggest a variety of expressions of ignorance with which to populate his text. Weichbrodt had written a script in the programming language Python that would weave through Wikipedia from any given starting point, assembling a list of article titles that resembles the kind of internet clickhole down which each of us occasionally plummets (or perhaps an internet browser\u2019s stream-of-consciousness). But the project of I Don\u2019t Know<\/em> was to deny any knowledge along this path: \u201cI\u2019m not well-versed in Literature. Sensibility \u2013 what is that? What in God\u2019s name is An Afterword? I haven\u2019t the faintest idea. And concerning Book design, I am fully ignorant. What is \u2018A Slipcase\u2019 supposed to mean again, and what the heck is Boriswood?\u201d (1).<\/p>\n

Weichbrodt\u2019s collaborator in 0x0a, the two-person literary collective from which I Don\u2019t Know <\/em>emerged, is Hannes Bajohr, who asked if I could help by contributing phrases. Finding this an extraordinarily fun task, I provided a long list. What in the world, who the hell, where the fuck \u2026 ? I haven\u2019t the foggiest idea. The result of my enthusiasm is that, for better or worse, the text occasionally sounds a bit like me (\u201cI\u2019ve never heard of People from Berlin. Is Heinz Schweizer famous or something? Who the shit is Alfred D\u00fcrr?\u201d (229).) I feel a little guilty about having left my fingerprints on Weichbrodt\u2019s piece, but he doesn\u2019t seem to mind at all. His ego doesn\u2019t trouble the work\u2019s course; mine couldn\u2019t, either.<\/p>\n

In I Don\u2019t Know<\/em>, the narrator\u2019s relentless claim to ignorance skews from the absurd \u2013 \u201cI don\u2019t know what people mean by \u2018A Building\u2019\u201d (6) \u2013 to the sneeringly dismissive \u2013 \u201cDo people even go to London?\u201d (5) \u2013 to the perfectly reasonable: \u201cVinca alkaloids are unfamiliar to me. And I\u2019m sorry, did you say \u2018Vinpocetine\u2019?\u201d (282). Often, the text undermines itself: \u201cI\u2019m completely ignorant of Art Deco architecture in Arkansas. Can you tell me how to get to The Drew County Courthouse, Dual State Monument, Rison Texaco Service Station or Chicot County Courthouse?\u201d (212). I don\u2019t know about you, but the narrator of I Don\u2019t Know<\/em> knows a hell of a lot more about Arkansas\u2019s architectural history than I do. [1]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

And yet computers, as they constantly remind us through their shocking stupidity, actually know next to nothing. The Python program that generated I Don\u2019t Know <\/em>makes no distinction between common sense and obscure data. There is a similar mechanism of bafflement at work in Holiday<\/em>, which Weichbrodt presented to the assembled guests at his salon. Holiday<\/em> begins from the post-Internet premise that documentation is more important than experience: what is a vacation if not photographs and pithy captions to explain them? This is exactly what Holiday <\/em>provides: photographs from Google Maps of randomly-chosen locations identified as landmarks, and text derived from the application of nascent image-recognition software from Imagga<\/a> to those photographs.<\/p>\n

\"12118682_10207159932870665_3474021428759764015_n\"<\/p>\n

In distilling the point of travel from the activity of it, the narrator of Weichbrodt\u2019s Holiday<\/em> calls to mind a literary precedent: Jean des Esseintes, the attenuated aristocrat of Joris-Karl Huysmans\u2019s 1884 novel \u00c0 rebours<\/em>, translated into English as Against Nature<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Against the Grain<\/em>. [2]<\/span><\/a> Des Esseintes, the dead-end of a long, inbred lineage, is so consumed with ennui<\/em> that even decadence bores him. He cloisters himself with prints by Moreau and Redon and luxuriously-bound editions of Mallarm\u00e9, and instead of leaving home, he simulates travel with evocative trinkets, pictures, and books: \u201cMovement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things.\u201d [3]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

But for Des Esseintes\u2019s armchair excursions, exertions of the imagination are still required. Who has the time, or the energy? Weichbrodt’s Holiday<\/em> improves upon Des Esseintes’s model by removing this last toil: the programming script takes on the work of imagination that itself replaced actual experience. (If the delectation of reality is refined by being purged of its messy and unnecessary aspects, then Weichbrodt \u2013 having rendered the delectation, too, obsolete \u2013 is the ultimate connoisseur.) \u201cTravel\u201d is the most vital embodiment of what we call experience. But its pleasure, as Huysmans remarks, \u201conly exists as a matter of fact in retrospect and seldom in the present, at the instant when it is being experienced.\u201d [4]<\/span><\/a> Therefore, Weichbrodt has achieved a victory over experience itself.<\/p>\n

Holiday <\/em>also demonstrates that what is gratuitously obvious to me \u2013 the names of kitchen appliances, for example \u2013 may be a matter of some difficulty for someone without my knowledge and experiences. If you have been a stranger in a strange land, you know the feeling. But imagine how a computer must feel: it knows only what it is told, lacking Des Esseintes\u2019s power of imaginative synthesis. Thus, in Holiday, <\/em>the narrator\u2019s observations veer from the superfluous to the spurious: whether the algorithm detects something that is obviously there, or apparently invents something that is not, it has missed the point of the photograph.<\/p>\n

Holiday<\/em>\u2019s shifts from image to text certainly foreground the failure of translation: the work would be less interesting if this tender technology were more successful. This failure provides the germ of much of 0x0a\u2019s output. [5]<\/span><\/a> But then, it\u2019s a commonplace that translation\u2019s inadequacy is also its strength: it produces a new work. It seems highly appropriate, then, that Weichbrodt and Bajohr\u2019s latest work, a collaboration, takes on translation directly. If any translation is imperfect, ever an interpretation, than surely more of them leads to a richer understanding of the original work. In this spirit of generosity, 0x0a has determined to double the number of English translations of Die Verwandlung <\/em>(The Metamorphosis), Franz Kafka\u2019s indispensable novella, which was first published one hundred years ago. This project, whose initial results we were privileged to hear during the salon \u2013 Weichbrodt read aloud the opening lines of all seven of these new texts \u2013 is of course called The Translation<\/em>. It is called that because \u201ctranslation\u201d is a synonym of \u201cmetamorphosis.\u201d From there, you have a pretty good picture of where the rest comes from. In these new interpretations, the celebrated Gregor Samsa (no relation) awakens to finds himself transformed into an \u201catrocious varmint,\u201d a \u201cmonstrous pest,\u201d a \u201cverminous glitch,\u201d a \u201clurid parasite,\u201d an \u201cimmoral louse,\u201d a \u201chorrific vermin,\u201d and a \u201cmammoth worm.\u201d As many of 0x0a\u2019s projects suggest, it is actually easier to create a new work than to communicate the meaning of an extant one. (Digital literature is doing its part to dethrone the tyrant of creativity.)<\/p>\n

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A scandalous verminous glitch. Gregor Weichbrodt translates Kafka. pic.twitter.com\/M3yW9mdLz2<\/a><\/p>\n

— Ranjit Bhatnagar (@ranjit) October 30, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n