Trailing the World Behind
// Text + Light Installation, 2016 // ASSIST Community Services Centre (Southwest Office), Edmonton // July 2016
Trailing the World Behind was a temporary text and light installation that explored the instability of meaning-making through processes of (mis)translation, (mis)interpretation, and technological intervention. Part of the larger ECOLOGIX research-creation platform, this project experimented with how language shifts, distorts, and transforms across cultural and technological boundaries.
The project began with an English-language text, written by Jessie Beier, which was passed through a series of multi-lingual collaborators who translated it into their mother tongue(s) using Google Translate before translating it back into English. This recursive process was repeated multiple times, allowing the text to evolve through linguistic slippages and digital distortions, ultimately generating a fragmented, unstable narrative.
Exhibited at ASSIST Community Services Centre (Southwest Office) in July 2016, the installation invited audiences to engage with the text’s progressive disintegration, highlighting the complexities of language, migration, and cultural transmission in an era of rapid technological mediation.
Installation view at ASSIST Community Services (Southwest), 2016