BEING BORGES is a transdisciplinary series by Ana María Caballero, presented in partnership with Verse and Office Impart.
This series proposes a new form of literary translation, begging the question: What’s at stake when language becomes literal via the visual?
As a literary artist, Caballero’s work is rooted in the written word. In BEING BORGES, she brings to life twelve creatures from Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s iconic work of literature The Book of Imaginary Beings — a vast, soulful compendium of humanity’s imagined creatures.
She also works with the equivalent texts from the 1970 English translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, which Borges himself supervised.
Caballero uses these raw texts—intervening in no way whatsoever other than via parametrization—to generate AI photographs. In doing so, she reveals how this technology visually interprets Spanish versus English, unmasking biases ingrained in large data sets and underscoring the limits of literal translation.
The visual variances between the resulting images evidence the impossibility of “reading” Spanish and English in the same way, reminding us that languages are different sign systems with nuances and meanings that exist beyond their constructed signifiers.
The artist also writes a poem inspired by the original Spanish text, incorporating AI-generative semantics to delve into the poetics of prompts and weaving in intertextuality. This poem undergoes the same text-to-AI image translation, confronting the poetic with the prosaic.
The multifold layers of this project are plotted in a digital collage where Caballero triangulates all inputs and outputs.
With language framing so much of human thought process, BEING BORGES invites viewers to experience multilingual and multimodal readership as a transdisciplinary work of art.
To be Borges, is to play hide and seek with imagination and to know it will never be pinned down.
