Hyperrhiz 29

What Ana María Caballero’s Artistic Practice Can Teach Us About Translation

Can Koçak
University of Sussex

Citation: Koçak, Can. “What Ana María Caballero’s Artistic Practice Can Teach Us About Translation.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 29, 2025. doi:10.20415/hyp/029.e01

Abstract: Ana María Caballero’s interdisciplinary work delves into the intersections of language, technology, and the body, translating poetry and spoken word into diverse forms such as motion, silence, social media posts, and AI prompts. By exploring the dynamic relationship between language and media, Caballero’s practice embodies a multifaceted approach to translation. This essay examines how Caballero translates her creative ideas across these mediums, highlighting the tensions between brevity and expansion, and the evolving nature of translation in contemporary art and literature. Ultimately, her work opens new avenues for experiencing art and poetry, challenging traditional boundaries and inviting broader audiences to engage with her themes.

Keywords: translation, ekphrasis, generative AI, movement, non-speaking narrator, poetic expression.

Introduction

As a poet and interdisciplinary artist, Ana María Caballero explores the intersections of language, technology, and the body in her work, focusing on how poems and spoken word can be experienced through digital media. Given that the mediums she uses to convey her themes are constantly evolving, her work invites discussions on how practices change forms. Whether adapting text into body movement, creating silence from louder words, disseminating messages on social media while adhering to its stylistic demands, or using AI technology as a tool, Caballero’s work can be viewed under the umbrella term translation.

While the most common understanding of translation involves re-telling a piece of text in a different language, the theoretical and conceptual connotations of the word span various media and disciplines through which the original text can travel (Freeman, 2009). In this sense, translation is a multi-layered process, and Cabellero’s work, which incorporates diverse technologies and performance into poetry, could be seen as part of it.

Caballero’s ability to translate artistic and poetic language into accessible forms is central to her practice, as she continually seeks to broaden the reach of poetry beyond traditional readerships. By integrating technologies such as AI or blockchain and engaging in multimedia performance, she opens up new avenues for experiencing verse, inviting different audiences to connect with the emotional and intellectual depth of her work. This democratisation of artistic expression allows for greater inclusivity, while Caballero’s commitment to translation, in this broader sense, ensures that poetry remains a dynamic and evolving medium, resonating across cultural and technological boundaries.

Text into Motion

Ana María Caballero’s translation of text into motion recalls the concept of ekphrasis, which is conventionally explained as the vivid description of a visual artwork through language (Heffernan, 1991), but extended here into the digital and performative realm. In her work Literal Litoral (2024), the text is not simply described but embodied, with language serving as an aesthetic material that animates both body and space.

Caballero uses performance as a way to move beyond the static nature of the written word, translating poems into physical gestures that resonate with the rhythms and themes of her verse. This approach aligns with Renate Brosch’s argument in her article “Ekphrasis in the Digital Age” (2018), where she highlights how digital and multimedia forms of ekphrasis invite new modes of experiencing verbal emblems, turning language into something that can be seen, felt, and experienced.

Caballero’s spoken word and choreography serve as modern ekphrastic tools, where the movement becomes an extension of the poetic imagery, allowing the audience to perceive language as a dynamic, living form. By translating text into motion, she transcends the boundaries of traditional literary formats, allowing her poetry to be consumed through multiple sensory channels, thereby deepening its emotional and aesthetic impact, contributing to the evolution of ekphrasis into new media contexts (Brosch, 2018).

Words into Silence

When the choice by the artist to opt out of words and choose silence as a narrative device is considered, one can identify how the distinction between action and movement plays a crucial role here. Action can be seen as intentional and purposeful, often tied to visible or audible outcomes, where something is actively done or communicated. In contrast, movement encompasses a broader range of gestures, including pauses and silences, allowing for more subtle expressions. Specifically, ‘not moving’ can be a deliberate action and should not be mistaken for inertia.

In an earlier paper, I had put forward the concept of ‘non-speaking narrator’ to highlight how action, particularly in the form of silence, can carry the narrative forward without explicit movement (Kocak, 2020). In Caballero’s poetry and performances, this distinction becomes evident when words give way to moments of quiet. Here, silence does not signify an absence of communication but rather a deliberate movement toward deeper layers of meaning. While action conveys intent through visible effort or speech, movement – especially through silence – suggests an internal rhythm, an unspoken dialogue that invites contemplation and emotional resonance.

In this way, Caballero uses action, not necessarily in the sense of physical movement, but as a narrative technique that opens space for reflection, allowing her audience to engage with her work on a more introspective and emotional level.

Messages into 240 Characters and AI Prompts

Caballero’s exploration of how messages are condensed and communicated through social media platforms underscores the challenges artists face in contemporary times, where visibility can sometimes hinge on reducing complex ideas into 240 characters. Caballero acknowledges that while the heart and mind may suffer from such digital compression, artists today must engage with these systems to gain visibility and remain relevant. The ability to distill creative work into bite-sized pieces gives some artists an advantage, as they excel at translating their broader message into a format that meets the platform’s constraints. This transformation requires not only brevity but also a nuanced understanding of the platform's stylistic demands, pushing artists to become as adept at conveying meaning in fragments as they are in full-length works.

This necessity to adapt creative expression for social media parallels Caballero’s work with generative AI, where she transforms language into visual and digital forms. In Being Borges (2023), she translates literary references from Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings into AI-generated imagery, turning text into something more tangible, yet fundamentally altered. The AI prompts she crafts bridge the gap between the abstract potential of language and the literal representations it can produce. In doing so, Caballero questions the limits and potentials of translation, asking what is sacrificed or gained when poetic meaning is made visual. This practice reflects the broader challenge of condensing expansive ideas into compact formats, whether through the written word on social media or through AI interpretations of literary works.

Caballero further extends this process of translation in Paperwork (2023), where audience members are invited to respond to her spoken-word poetry with a single word, which is then used to generate digital sculptures via AI. Here, the act of translation becomes collaborative, as the audience’s brief emotional reactions are materialised into new, abstract forms. The process echoes the constraints of social media, where complex thoughts are condensed into brief responses, but with the added dimension of AI, these reactions are expanded back into intricate digital artworks. The interplay between brevity and complexity in both social media and AI-driven projects reveals Caballero’s keen awareness of how messages evolve as they shift between mediums and technologies.

Ultimately, Caballero’s work reflects the necessity of translating artistic and poetic language into accessible forms for a wide range of audiences. Whether through the restrictive confines of social media or the expansive possibilities of AI, or through finding new ways of experiencing text in motion and silence, she navigates the tension between compression and expansion, engaging with the demands of contemporary digital platforms while continuously exploring the boundaries of expression.

References

Brosch, R. (2018). “Ekphrasis in the Digital Age: Responses to Image.” Poetics Today 39(2): 225-243.

Freeman, R. (2009). “What is ‘translation’?” Policy Press 5(4): 429-447.

Heffernan, James A. W. (1991). “Ekphrasis and Representation.” New Literary History 22(2): 297-316.

Koçak, C. (2020). “The ‘non-speaking narrator’ as a methodological tool of analysis for various practices of discourse.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 11(1): 15-24.