The league of the willows

A dot. A small, black, microbeam isolated over a white page from which language is born. Dot is also the surname of an artist whose work is materialised from words. Maybe all of this is a little too OuLiPo, a literary group cofounded by Raymond Queneau, the man who jumped the abyss between rigid written French and rough spoken French. It was Georges Perec, another member of OuLiPo, who said that to be totally free, you first have to establish some rules. In his autobiography, W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975), Perec wrote, “My family name is Peretz. It is found in the Bible. In Hebrew it means ‘hole’.” A hole through which words escape and where, in the end, only one point remains. Perec in Hungarian means pretzel by the way.

There are other abysses: those that lie between words and words (translations from one language to another), between images and words (interpreting a painting) and between words and images (adapting a book for film). Many things fall into those abysses. In Siskin or a speculative study on the possibility of a language of plants (2018–21), Anna Dot stumbles into the abyss that exists between academia and the Google Translate app. It is a project that includes a ^{performance-lecture} (also readable in a PDF), a ^video and a series of ^images.

Her bad relationship with indoor plants was the starting point.
A performance she created based on the figure of Olga Sacharoff was the starting point.
A trip to Tallinn was the starting point: it was there where she found ^{a book} about botany written in Russian in an old bookshop. After that, she went home to Barcelona, back to resurrecting her indoor plants and catching up with her PhD research, which was focused on translation. Eventually, she became bored with her thesis, started to play around with her phone, and opened the Google Translate app, setting it to translate from Russian to English. She then chose the camera option to collect data and focused the lens on photographs of vegetation in the book she had bought in Estonia. Google’s algorithm identified expressions of a linguistic nature in the images, giving her the impression that the plants themselves were the ones “talking”. For example, when she directed her phone’s camera to a plant that looked like a geranium, the word that appeared over the underside of the leaves was “^her”.

In another, she obtained the following message:

NEEDLES LEAGUE AND TO THE NILE AND NILE MM HER CHILD THE L.A. TO THE NILE TO THE NILE LEAGUES HEDGEHOG THE LEAGUE OF THE WILLOWS THREAD SOUTH FEET AH AND HER

At the same time that she was in her linguist’s robe experimenting with plants and words, she received an invitation to make a performance about Olga Sacharoff, a Georgian artist said to be the person who brought Cubism to Barcelona. Dot was hypnotised by Sacharoff’s painting Matrimoni (Marriage) (1920), where some indoor plants appear as a symbol of marriage. They were very similar to those in the book from Estonia. That coincidence could not be random.

She realised she had witnessed what she deems the “first cubist results” of the machine’s Russian-to-English translation of plants, putting the avant-garde background of the painter in dialogue with the crossroads of current technology. From that crossing – which respects neither temporal nor material borders – the inspiration arose, and the performance-lecture, video and series of photographs of the images generated within the app on Dot’s phone became her way of presenting her findings to the public.

If you’re curious about this topic, there is very serious research that says plants are, in fact, talking (communicating) to each other, and there are scientists developing apps that listen to our photosynthetic friends. A 1983 paper analyses how red alder (Alnus rubra) and Sitka willow (Salix sitchensis) trees subjected to attack by tent caterpillars (Malacosomacalifornicum pluviale) and webworms (Hyphantria cunea) alert each other to prevent assaults.

But Dot’s own will was not to break from one thesis and embark on another. It was an artistic and comedic attempt to play with language – at the expense of some “talking” plants.

Bim blassa galassasa zimbrabim
Blassa glallassasa zimbrabim

From Talking Plants to Talking Heads… Their song “I Zimbra”, with its invented lyrics, is as if Dadaists were equipped with synthesisers and congas. By the way, Sacharoff was a contributor to Francis Picabia’s magazine 391. And oh, also, in the video, David Byrne looks like he’s trying to dance as if a willow were alerting an alder to a caterpillar intruder.

Siskin or a speculative study on the possibility of a language of plants is the floral version of Finnegans Wake. Recalling James Joyce’s penchant for invented words, something he took a liking to when he moved to Trieste (a place where he listened to people speak but understood nothing), it shows us how to be lost in translation. Far from generating obstacles, this fact catapulted his literary creativity: Finnegans Wake is a language laboratory.

It turns out that I now live in Moscow. The Google Translate app has been my saviour during forays into local supermarkets, saving me from eating expired cans of smoked fish. While the mask makes my glasses fog up in the caviar section, my hand outstretched, holding my phone, I remember a lapidary phrase by William Burroughs: Language is a virus. When I go back home, after watering my plants, I watch Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) on my computer. An atomic holocaust strikes Japan as six nuclear reactors in a power plant explode, spewing radiation everywhere. As a collateral effect, the plants increase in size until they become giants. I pause the movie at exactly the moment when the subtitles, superimposed on a frame showing some monstrous sunflowers, read “^{human beings are such idiots}”. I wonder if that’s what the narrator says, or one of the characters in the film, or if it’s actually the plants. I reread the PDF upon which Dot’s performance-lecture was based: “For political reasons that have their origin in the Cold War years, mechanisms of automatic translation that are able to offer the highest quality are those that translate from Russian into English.” And then I take a look at the news: “Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been seized by Russian military forces, according to regional authorities, after a fire sparked by overnight shelling burned for several hours at the largest facility of its kind in Europe.”

What will the plants think of all this nonsense? Will the iPhone 17 have the ability to supplant human speech? Will Dot’s plants survive their clueless caretaker? Is there anyone reading this?