International Forum on Artistic Research
17th Conference of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR)
Submission Number: 395
Submission ID: 467
Submission UUID: d755686b-825d-4407-98af-bec77a7e3550

Created: Mon, 2 Mar 2026 - 23:52
Completed: Mon, 2 Mar 2026 - 23:59
Changed: Wed, 13 May 2026 - 08:55

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Submitted by: Anonymous
Language: English

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Given name Avishek
Surname Ganguly
Email aganguly@risd.edu
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Title Translation and Endangered Languages: A Transdiciplinary Conversation
Format Roundtable contribution
Main language English
Abstract Endangered conceptual worlds, as invoked by this year’s Forum, are often imagined and represented in minoritized languages. Our round table approaches these issues through a discussion of translation and hopes to explore its significance for artistic research. However, we propose a rethinking of translation beyond its conventional understanding as a mode of interlingual transfer; instead, we argue for an expansive notion of translation as method and medium for creative as well as research practice. Translation, even in this formulation, always remains an imperative even if it is never enough; however, it is no longer merely literary but also performative, transpiring in sound and voice, gesture and movement, script and code; in sum, we propose a new understanding of translation as a practice that takes place across media and platforms. Here, then, are some of the questions we seek to address in our round-table: what happens to languages through or after translation? If a “small language” only survives through translation, how does this affect the language even for native speakers? How does computation reshape the relationship between translation and creativity? How do we move towards an understanding of translation as a generative infrastructural process rather than as a secondary act of representation? What indeed does an intermedial practice of translation look like?
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Short biographies of the presenter(s)
  • Avishek Ganguly is Associate Professor in the Department of Literary Arts and Studies at Rhode Island School of Design. He has recently co-edited Translation and Performance in a Global Age (Cambridge University Press, 2023) with Kélina Gotman, and Living Translation: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Seagull Books, 2022) with Emily Apter, Mauro Pala and Surya Parekh. His current projects include a cultural history of “Englishes,” and an exploration of the intersections between humanities and design.
  • Michael Schwab is a London-based artist and artistic researcher who investigates post-conceptual uses of technology in a variety of media including photography, drawing, printmaking, and installation art. He holds a M.A. in philosophy (Hamburg University) and a PhD in photography (Royal College of Art, London) that focuses on post-conceptual post-photography and artistic research methodology. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR), co-editor of Intellectual Birdhouse. Artistic Practice as Research. (2012) and co-editor of The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia (2013) among several other publications.
  • Raluca Tanasescu (PhD University of Ottawa) is a researcher in translation and global media at the University of Galway, where she works on multilingual digital communication as part of the ERC-funded PIETRA project. Her scholarly work is situated at the nexus of translation, complexity, new media and computational humanities, and focuses on how digitality upholds intersemiotic and interepistemic translation processes. She currently serves as the Chair of the Multilingualism and Multiculturalism Committee with the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.
  • Chris Tanasescu is an internationally active computational intermedia poet and humanities data scientist at the University of Galway. #GraphPoem is his long-standing academic-creative initiative presented as participatory intermedia coding performance at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute since 2019. His latest edited collection is Literature and Computation (Routledge, 2024) and his forthcoming one is A Computationally Assembled Anthology of Contemporary Belgian Poetry (MARGENTO, collective ed.), co-edited with Raluca Tanasescu and lead translator John Taylor (Peter Lang 2026).
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