The Sylphs

Ana María Caballero

The Sylphs proposes a new form of literary translation, asking: What’s at stake when language becomes literal via the visual? This work is part of Caballero's Being Borges series, which takes Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings (a vast compendium of humanity’s imagined creatures) and its translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni as points of departure from which to explore how AI interprets Spanish versus English text, unmasking biases ingrained in large data sets. This collection delves into the impossibility of translation. AI cannot “read” Spanish and English the same way because they are different sign systems, with nuances that exist beyond their constructed signifiers, their words.

By presenting words beside the suite of images they generate, The Sylphs invites viewers to experience language as a transdisciplinary work of art, one whose meanings reverberate past their established systems of signification. From Virginia Valenzuela's exhibition text: 'Ana Maria Caballero’s series “Being Borges” is rooted at the crux of signifier and signified, of language and interpretation, of precision and ambiguity. Using AI to translate the original text, the original translation, and her own original interpretation into images, Caballero exacerbates the differences between three different voices attempting to describe the exact same thing. The process of using AI, a machine that has been trained on human data– and yet, is not human, and thus not able to cover up its biases–reveals simultaneously, the importance of word choice, and the futility of word choice.'