Una Hepburn studied at UdK Berlin and received her Diploma as a Meisterschülerin in July 2018.
 

This body of work is an effort not only to create a visual language, but also to translate verbal language into visual language. Much like in inter-lingual machine translation, the verbal information is systematically broken down, it goes through a series of algorithms and is ultimately put together again in a way that is natural in the target language. In this case the target language is visual.

 

While language is processed serially, images are taken in all at once; language is one-dimensional, images are two-dimensional. The images produced by the process conform to the norms of image presentation. What is achieved here is essentially inter-semiotic machine translation; inter-semiotic translation being interpretation of verbal signs by means of non-verbal sign systems.

 

The words ‘text’ and ‘texture’ come from the same Latin root word: textus, which is in translation ‘woven’ or ‘having been woven’. Lexical units come together and create utterances, several utterances then form sentences and paragraphs: verbal weavings that transmit experiences. Much like that visual units, like colour, pixels, frames all make up a visual grammar. The work explores the relationship between language and image, the conventions of both of the aforementioned, as well as those of translation, by appropriating the functions of computer vision programs, search engines and image data banks.

 

What you see here is a series of self-referential advertising objects, i.e a

banner that says ‘banner’, or a poster that says ‘poster’.