Bulletin "New-Method" No. 40 - New-Method

"New-Method" No. 40

"New-Method" released our "Fourth New-Methodicist Manifesto" on September 4, 2014. The same day marked our fourth anniversary.
Our bulletins will be distributed only in Japanese and English as ever.
We introduce No. 40 of our email bulletin with our works and guest contributions. This issue features Manabu Matsushita for the contributor, a gallerist and translator, who has contributed to our bulletins three times in No. 1, No. 23, and No. 34.

[Contribution]

Someone Else Thinks
Manabu Matsushita (Gallerist/Translator)

On 4 September, 2014, New-Method published Forth New-Methodicist Manifesto, where they translate a tautological self-definition "New-Method is New-Method" in 40 languages. The selection of these 40 languages is based on availability of translators, which implies translation by humans is very significant because they could have used machine-translation if they just pursued the number.

The mission of translation is to reconstruct a given text into another language in a different frame of references. However, the language is essentially metaphoric, and one's thought is always fabricated as involuntarily bricolage. The magical moment where a word and an idea identify each other has already been lost in verbalization by the very author, without waiting translation. The meaning of words is not self-evident both in the original language and in the resulting translation. Knowing the limit, a translator still has to manage how and what to translate. This is a classic "the task of the translator" issue unfinished ever since 1923.

Machines and humans approach this task differently. Machines never think. They trust the given words as self-explanatory and convert them loyally. Humans think. No matter how successful it would be, they question the given words and imagine the author's thoughts and readers' interpretations in order to arbitrate various possibilities. Put their superiority aside, it is always clear which thinks and which doesn't.

New-Method employed translators, but it may not suggest they believe in humans as superior to machines. New-Method might use them to make someone else think of the meaning of their possibly nonsense manifesto. Machines don't help because they don't think. Translators do for sure. Then, however sincerely translators try, their efforts become just a gesture of thought, which in turn constitutes a formal action that New-Method abandon the ever-suspended meaning of their own manifesto by letting their agents undertake it.

[Web Works of the New-Methodicists]

- Takahiro Hirama

Ant

http://hrmtkhr.web.fc2.com/new-method/040_e.html

No description.

- Shogo Baba

Multi-Layered Matrix of Numbers No. 1

http://7x7whitebell.net/new-method/shogobaba/040_e.html

In 2009, I made a pictorial work called "Mode of Color-Layering Different Events." The work arranges playing cards systematically by regarding their numbers and suits as respectively autonomous elements. By replacing paint colors with symbolic meanings, the work intends to be a sort of "color-layering" as in the painting.
"Multi-Layered Matrix of Numbers" is a more abstract version of the above-mentioned work, which uses only numbers while regarding visual and symbolic meanings of signs as respectively autonomous elements of a work.

- Masaru Kaido

Form of Ketchup

http://masarukaido.com/newmethod/b040_e.html

Following the previous work, this work uses an omelette as the theme. Instead of an omelette itself, this work focuses on ketchup on it. The background uses omelette color to suggest it.