In the exhibition D’autres voix · langage · code · traduction (Other Voices · Language · Code · Translation), visitors encounter a multitude of languages, alphabets, and dialects, born or transformed by the generativity or virality of new technologies. These include the ones we invented: computer languages (Python, Java…), the creative and political stakes of Unicode characters, which give all our writing systems a common code, and even esoteric programming languages. Not to mention how AIs are trained to communicate, which is far from straightforward. Machines are learners, but they need supervision. There are also the modes of communication of non-human living beings, such as the scent of plants, whose signals scientists and technologists are trying to analyze by modeling them. And finally, the new modes of communication, built around images, that are emerging from the Internet and social media: memes, emojis, Italian brainrot…
With new technologies, the means (and therefore the ways) of communicating are multiplying. Translation is becoming a central condition of our experience of the world. To translate no longer means only to move from one language to another, but to navigate constantly between forms of expression. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” so much is our perception of reality shaped, in part, by the language we have at our disposal. The exhibition invites us to consider how, today, we are pushing back our own limits.