Morfill, S., Cavic, A., 2025.

Translating Line: the bridge between drawing and writing

This illustrated presentation aligns the concept of bridging with a process of translation, citing Rules that order the reading of clouds (Cavic and Morfill, 2016), an animated artwork that explores a back-and-forth process of translation between drawing and writing.
Our animation repeatedly reconfigures a series of lines in the digital space to alternately create image and text. Inspired by Henri Michaux's proposition to reconcile drawing and writing 'which after all are attributes of the same line' (Jenny, 2000), our work by contrast proposes the protean line as a bridge between text and image, as it encodes both literary and visual meaning.
The presentation explores how a productive dialogic approach to collaboration in visual arts can be illuminated with reference to literary translation e.g. Vilém Flusser's process which is described as 'a constant circling, nomadic movement that never loses sight of its starting point, indeed, always returning back to it to deny and move beyond it again' (Finger et al., 2011). Referencing syllabic alphabets, in which thousands of words can be generated form a finite number of letterforms, and John Berger's description of drawing as a speculative process of discovery that generates 'marks for a project, of something to come' (Berger, 2001), the work is characterised by movement both within the process and in the sense of shifting meanings that are conveyed. Identifying drawing and writing as distinct languages with the capacity to convey meaning, Rules highlights the interpretative process of translation-in-movement, as the flow of animation oscillates between languages.