Glitchy Language: The Rosetta Theatre Project

Abstract

This article discusses the Rosetta Theatre Project, an immersive, multimedia, multilingual installation at the University of Georgia (2018) in which two live-actors in motion-capture suits and recorded voice actors presented two short scenes from Molière and Shakespeare that were simultaneously remediated into four different computer environments with present-day and historical settings and shown on four large display screens behind the live actors themselves. Recorded, native English and French speakers voiced Shakespeare’s and Molière’s early texts, Molière translated into a pastiche of Shakespearean blank verse, Victor Hugo’s translation of Shakespeare, and “translations” of Shakespeare’s and Molière’s words to twenty-first-century, idiomatic speech. In addition to this polyglot, transhistorical mélange, an extra-textual language emerged: the language of “glitches”. Glitches, in common usage, are errors or failures of electronic systems, qualities deliberately adopted by the practitioners of so-called glitch art and discussed in art criticism as glitch theory. Paradoxically, however, the computer glitches made visible – and timely – a new subtext for both scenes. Unwanted and unseemly, these crude video glitches behind the living, breathing actors paradoxically transformed the rough computer animations into fresh ways of experiencing old drama and a heightened awareness of topical concerns.