Horse Exchange is a work that consists of two videos.

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Horse Exchange 1 is an edited recording of a Zoom call between me and Baek. During the Zoom session, we take turns in shitty translations. Baek starts the session by proposing the horse, “shitty translation,” and I translate that. We go back and forth for twenty minutes. We translate into any language we want to, which includes Korean, English, photos, handwriting, laughing, and moving things on our shared virtual whiteboard. The language we use includes motion, and thus cannot be understood by a single screenshot. Overlaid on the video of us exchanging horses is a commentary that tries to help the viewers follow our streak of translation. It relies mostly on Papago, a translator on the web, but gives up when it has to.

 

Horse Exchange 2 is an AI’s shitty translation of our horses. All of the horses exchanged during our Zoom session are reduced into screenshots, and those images are fed into an image caption-generating AI.

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