Biography

French, British and Canadian (as an adult), Damien Elliott is a visual, digital and conceptual artist. He seeks logic in chaos.

In his opinion, all translation implies alteration. It is from this slight mutation that he finds the inspiration for his conceptual process.

His favourite tools for creating monochrome concepts that are minimalist, ordered and thought-provoking are typography, computer code, statistical representations and copyright-free images.

About the artwork

Every translation is an alteration. The idea that every cultural concept has its equivalent in all the the other language is false. At best it’s a simplification of truth, at worst a vulgarisation of reality. This is the main concept behind my series Altered echo, the series of the artwork Genesix.

Genesix is a comparative study of the translation of a single text into six different Indo-European languages:

Writing down langages and defining a proper meaning for each sound might have been one of the most precious invention our civilisation saw. But at the same time it killed something. Something that came right from the essence of languages : its organic and random freedom of changing and reinventing itself all the time, depending on the accent of each village, the lack of bishop in others or the sudden migration of a foreign culture.

The writing froze our languages suddenly.

The timing had not been prepared in any way. The incredible, chaotic, laborious journey of spoken languages creativity had come to an end. The elasticity was to be replaced with norma. The accent by spelling.

How many dialects did you kill writing? How many specific village traditions did you melt together into a large regional culture soup?

Could we consider the writing of spoken languages as the first globalisation act? The first step into the monotone harmonisation of our differences?

Slang rules / Language is Pop culture.