Let me begin by translating the expression, "lost in translation" into a mental image.  A translation may be seen as an intricate lace folded in two.  Imagine that it is possible to detect an underlying pattern through part of the same cloth folded over itself. The translator is a lacemaker who translates not only a mental design into a pattern of threads but by folding the cloth, joins one network of semantic complexity with another.  The spaces between the threads and patterns constitute loss.

 

The Lacemaker Vermeer, 1669-70.
Oil on canvas transferred to panel, 23.9 x 20.5 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

In The Lacemaker 1669-70, Vermeer translates a mental activity into an image, much like the lacemaker who translates her thoughts into expressions of lace. The woman works the lace, the image of which is both lost to us and yet also brought to mind. Does she work with an image in her mind, as we do? Or does she improvise, losing herself in her creativity, in her labyrinthine lace? The Lacemaker is an image of the unrepresentable which is lost to us - the woman's thought - whether this is an internal visualization of the lace, a story, or anything else, yet this loss, this non-representable space, confronts us and we are immersed by it, as we are by the painting's silence and the silence it represents.  The visual representation of her mental introspection, which withdraws into itself is much like the introspection of the viewer who sees the painting disappear, as the image of his or her own withdrawal from the external world comes to mind. She is lost in the physical labor of her intricate design, as we are lost in Vermeer's.  In the same way, we leave behind the world, the book and the picture when we are lost in the story and in the imagery of the story. The lace is lost not only because we do not see it but also because the process of its intricacy ensnares us.  The threads lead us into the maze, not out of it. The translation of physical labor into mental introspection and vice versa deny both the pictorial frame and the literal, mimetic presentation: "this is a lacemaker in seventeenth century Netherlands."  Lost in translation are both the frame (denoting and actualising the physicality of the image) and the projected physicality within the frame.[i]  The "reality" presented to us by Vermeer is none other than our own mental processes that appear to be reflected back by the lacemaker's thinking - her mental work is our mental work.[ii] I thus translate mimesis as "mental mimesis," the mental introspection of the viewer represented by the painted subject, losing the physicality usually associated with mimetic reproduction through illusionism.[iii] The painting's literal subject is reversed, from a 'window on reality of a woman in seventeenth century Netherlands' to focus on the viewer and his or her mental processes.

If translation is a work of lace, we may view what is lost as the interstitial patterns formed by the spaces between the threads of thought.  In this article I want to take the mental image of lost in translation further.  Lacemaking is also like tracing intertextuality, where the form, structure and sense of one word, or a body of words, may be experienced through others simultaneously, like viewing the pattern of the lace through its folds.  I would like to examine and compare several images as intertextual networks viewing also, the spaces in between.[iv]

Not entirely lost in translation in Vermeer's Lacemaker is the residue of the myth of Arachne, excluded by Vermeer's clever hidden face: of the work at hand that the lacemaker is engaged in, which we do not see and (which causes) her own non-faciality.  Arachne, in Ovid's Metamorphoses was gifted in the art of weaving.  Her tapestries were beautiful to look at, but also the way in which she wove was a sight to behold.  Observers were wont to attribute her skill to the patron goddess of weaving, Athena.  This made Arachne proud.  Athena comes to earth disguised as a mortal to enter into a competition with her. Athena began to weave the scene of her contest with Poseidon for the city of Athens.  Arachne, created a tapestry depicting the follies of Zeus and his various infidelities. These are mental images within the mental framework of the story, and are again, a series of collapsing spaces. The onlookers tend to favour Arachne's creation over Athena's.  Thus enraged, the goddess punishes Arachne by touching her forehead to make her feel deep shame.  But after committing suicide, it is the goddess Athena who repents and transforms poor Arachne into a spider so that her descendents forever hang from threads and become great weavers.  The Lacemaker is a 'becoming' of Arachne, the tale from Metamorphoses undergoes metamorphosis.

Athena "translates" herself into a mortal, losing the explicit appearance of her divinity, in order to compete with Arachne whose skills are compared to her own. This is already a parody of mimetic relationships that are thematized in the descriptions in the story of the mimetic tapestries the two competitors weave.  The translation here is clearly one which broaches the theme of divine (original) creation and its translation in the human realm and with human creativity in the form of art.  Divine creation is a downward movement, human creation anagogic, both directions appear to confront each other in the competition and are represented thematically in the tapestry works themselves.  Arachne mocks the gods by weaving stories of lust and shame attributed to the actions of Zeus, while Athena chooses to translate the weaving competition into a picture of an earlier competition with Poseidon that she had won. Both beautifully translate stories into visual experiences and mimic the simplistic idea of representation.  The form of story itself is an intricate weaving, and uses weaving as a metaphor for its own complexity and richness of meaning.

Screen grab of still from the film,
Un Chien Andalou, 1928, featuring a photograph of Vermeer's The Lacemaker
in a book (unknown)

http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurrealismUnChienAndalou1.htm

This image of The Lacemaker is a series of translations as complex as lace can be.  I propose that each translation that it represents is a portrait of the loss of the frame, and the loss of the illusion of physicality inside it.  Each translation is a critique of representation.

1.Translation One: A woman sits at a table fashioning lace (did she, ever?) Is the painting a pure reflection of an act in history, which Vermeer witnessed and transformed from real lace and flesh and blood into a camera obscura, or directly, "into" a painting?  Or is The Lacemaker Vermeer's elaborate retelling of the myth of Arachne?  Here, the first loss is of  "the woman who is making lace in seventeenth century Netherlands" and loss surrounds "mimesis".

2.Translation Two: oil on canvas is transferred to panel.

3.Translation Three: it is a photograph in a book, which loses the material aspect of the (color) oil painting on canvas, on panel.

4.Translation Four: It is a still from a film, Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Buñuel, 1928.  Here the loss is of the film in which the frame is ensconced, and the instances of translations 1-3.  Note that it is also a frame, in the sense of celluloid, one among others.

5.Translation Five: The image is a digital transformation with browser frames which sheds yet cannot shake off the translations 1-4.  It cannot propose mimesis because what is being represented constantly shifts from one thing to another, one medium to another, and one moment of creation or reproduction to another. 

Much like a work of lace in which the subject loses herself, the image has lost itself in an intricate web of translations that my words and descriptions extend (Translation 6). Lost in translation can be the actual loss of one medium replaced by other, more or less historically specific generations of media. The Lacemaker is re-mediated, both in the sense of put into a new medium and also in the sense that it is remediated by the viewer.

The mind continually describes itself and translates one reality into another, losing each medium specific expression along the way.  The Lacemaker's designs are designs embedded in others, she translates her thoughts into expressions of lace, and we see the re-mediation of The Lacemaker through its various transformations as something that telescopes into an ineffable origin.  Note how the image is framed as many times as it is translated and every time it is framed, the frame is left behind for a new, "penetrated" space that represents a thought within a thought, or the limit of a perception overlapping with another perception, like folded lace.

Reversing the direction of thought however, we face the possibly illusory proposition of retracing the previous from its translation in an attempt to allow us to regain lost time, matter and space. One extends and collapses a telescope. The notion of lost in translation is a paradox that both asserts and critiques loss.  It is premised on the sense of loss of an identity, a pre-existent original, or prime mover, which are counterfeited, copied or represented.  This is also the fallacy of mimesis. But every loss is nostalgic and brings that beginning, mythical or otherwise, to mind.  More than this, each translation may be translated as a thing in and for itself, not parasitic upon the other. Lost is the proposition of mistranslation.  In other words, each translation need not be a pale representation of an antecedent but an ontologically separate entity that seeks self-expression in the moment-medium. This particular translation of the translation replaces a series of causal links in a possibly hierarchical chain into co-existent realities that lie side-by-side with each other, as in a patchwork quilt or, as in lace whose pattern may be detected through however many times it has been folded. Seeing through the mimesis of the image allows us to conceive of signification as a series of framed or embedded spaces, each a transformation of the lacemaker. In this way, this signification is intertextual (read: 'interpictorial'), a palimpsest, a series of superimpositions that may be placed over or underneath each other, so that one may be seen through the other, and through which the idea of the original identity is veiled and continually translated. One image is read through another, literally and figuratively.    

By translating the mythos of weaving into the painting of The Lacemaker, not only does Vermeer present an opportunity for the viewer to remember the story of Arachne translated from mythological tapestry into a visual sensation in the oil medium, but also the tale is translated into the context of seventeenth century Netherlands where the viewer may read a complex allegory dressed in prosaic simulation. Vermeer's lacemaker who weaves her beautiful tapestry is telling a story about hubris and about the arrogation of divine power.  In Vermeer's painting she weaves next to a prayer book very clearly contrasting divine creation with creativity, the latter a kind of flawed mimesis of the former, as an earthly garden may be seen as a flawed reflection of paradise. Vermeer is just as much a lacemaker as his Lacemaker. The myth may be seen to lie as a lost fragment in all other translations of this work (1-6) into the other medium-specific contexts I have identified in the digital image of the still from Un Chien Andalou. The conclusion is particularly succinct as a metaphor for the transmission of an oral and visual tradition: the generations of spiders are metaphors for storytellers, who intertextually weave their tales over, and in and out of all of the others, mutating the story from one transformation to another, folding the lace over and over again.  Each translation weaves the myth into a new medium and we are, in a sense, Arachne's descendents when we participate in a tradition of translating The Lacemaker from ancient myth to 21^st digital image, or in the reverse direction.  The digitisation of the still of The Lacemaker enframes not only images with specific historic contexts but also different ways of seeing.  Digitization and the frames one uses, and almost thoughtlessly in Web browsing, are ways seeing and using images that are intertextual literally and figuratively and the digital image of The Lacemaker and its various quotations show us how our visuality in the digital age is a re-mediation of earlier ways of seeing.  This will become clearer as we proceed.

What we lose in the corpus of translations represented by the digital image, screen dump, screen grab of a still from Le Chien Andalou is mimesis: the image of a woman making lace in the seventeenth century by Vermeer.  But this is an echo of the fact that Vermeer's work is also a loss of mimesis (it represents "thought"/the myth of Arachne, not merely a woman making lace). The still from the film is a duplicate of other stills in the same reel.  The digital image of the still is a duplicate of a duplicate of a duplicate.  The "frame" of the digital image is not only the edge of the .jpeg image and the page on which it is "placed" but "the page"/ image of the browser itself and the computer monitor through which, you, reader, view it, re-presents not only the idea of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction but the omnipresence (everywhere and nowhere) of the lacemaker. Each frame represents a translation through which it is possible to see another translation, a further distancing effect from the persuasive powers of illusionism. Digital embedding is a translation of embedding in painting.  Each frame marks both a mental and physical threshold, a thought within a thought, leaving behind one kind of physicality, or projected physicality, for another.   Each frame is a translation of the one inside it (or, reversing direction, "outside" it) and each translation in both directions witnesses a loss of mimesis. 

The work of lace can be defined by what is lost in the spaces between its patterning. Translation reveals both pattern and pattern of loss. Each translation leaves behind a frame. Lost in translations of The Lacemaker are the following framing devices: author, original creative act, God, art, medium, truth, time, space, thought (displaced by thought, etcetera). Instead, there is a fluidity, a stream of consciousness which continually resists any freeze-framing device. This is what happens with Web browsing. We no longer believe that the frame contains a static reality or truth but a series of translations through which we travel. No longer is the Byzantine icon, Garbo's face, the classically sealed body, infinity in the grain of sand enough to mesmerize us; indeed, they are struck out and criss-crossed by our retracing, by our activity "within" the image that subverts its integrity, and by the routes of our searches and our rapid eye movements.  As a fleeting series of frames, one succeeding the other, the still from Le Chien Andalou represents both the shimmering nature of film and the nature of translation as dynamic intertextuality.  We read the image (and the image on the Web) not as a mimetic singular message but one charged with a particular energy that will not stay still.  The hyperactivity of meaning continually displaces the permanence of the image in space and at the same time in the synthesis of meaning. The image is a journey, it is not a destination.

But before continuing with the theme of the translation of The Lacemaker and how it contextualizes our contemporary visuality and shows us what we have lost or gained, it is important to embark on one more very important translation, one that is in addition to the temporal variances I have attempted. Lost in translation in each of the transformative frames that the still from Le Chien Andalou brings to mind is the idea of European culture living off itself.  But does this cultural self-reference include the digital reproduction of the image by the browser frame? Does the Web and net art share in the ethnocentrism of frames within frames? Is it possible to translate the way I have approached the analysis of frames within frames with this by now canonical cinematic image into another cultural domain, outside of Western art? Can frames within frames be translated into another cultural experience? So within the translation of Lost in Translation, I insert the obvious, perhaps, the translation of the discourse from one cultural domain to another. New losses and gains will inevitably reappear and throw up new observations about contemporary digital visuality.

The following pictorial example represents yet another translation of "lost in translation" and breaks its cultural frame.  I take a painting from seventeenth century Mughal India,[v] a miniature painting in a Mughal album [vi]

Screen Grab of the painting from a Jahangir period album, Mughal Indian, early seventeenth century.  

The image represents several levels of fiction, one inside the other.  The Mughal painting reproduced digitally here, presents an inconsistent conception of space according to the Western eye; see, for example the way in which the cornice of the square building on the left is joined to the red fence.  There a number of framed areas, the painting of a picture by an artist dressed in red on the left and a window space behind him, and a painting on an easel in front of the artist in white on the right. The figure offering a picture to someone outside of the frame above appears to float above these scenes.  The large figure with a dark complexion, bottom right, paints on a board which appears to rest on the line created by the floor and base of the building; an evidently impossible feat.  The "window" behind the painter in red to the left just as easily could be a framed painting, which contrasts with the other paintings portrayed in this space, one a Virgin Mary figure and on the right, a landscape with figures.  Viewed as a whole, the painting is a series of compartments, frames, squares each preserving a sense of its own spatial reality, creating a collage of recessions and protrusions and paradoxical spaces, all divided or subdivided by framing devices. It is less concerned with representing coherent illusionistic space, or time but to deconstruct them.  The theme of this painting is about framing,[vii] enclosing, creating a wide variety of views, each of which can be read as a discrete area inviting interpretation.  As such, it appears as an abstract painting[viii] capable of revealing the essential elements of the creation and reception of image making.   It thematizes artistic production, the fabrication of perceived realities and viewing behaviours.  Like Vermeer's Lacemaker it also thematizes intellectual labor involved in both viewing and painting.

Screen Grab of Mughal painting, detail.

Above, the man dressed in white wearing red shoes, possibly an artistic supervisor or artist, carries a painting in his hands to someone outside of the frame to the left.  A closer look reveals that he is actually offering up a self-portrait showing himself, again, offering up a picture to a person placed outside of the frame. The picture in the picture features the same green background and the man portrayed has the same beard and wears the same white clothes, gold sash and red shoes.  With the aid of a magnifying glass, one can also spot a third, further illusion of an 'internal duplication' of the same picture of the white figure holding a picture.  The mise en abyme[ix] of the painting in the red frame held by the figure in white at the top left is a translation of these complicated framing processes and blatantly thematizes the concept of different levels of fiction within each frame, it also suggests infinite regress. Furthermore, the screen grab frame "enclosing" the Mughal Album painting presents a time frame, and each interior time frame takes us back into time and mental space.  Seen as a whole, the panorama of frames is a folding up of mental space upon itself, as the intricacy of lace can be folded upon itself and seen within itself and through itself.  The screen grabs of The Lacemaker and the Mughal painting are images of "thought" as a self-reproducing, self-generative process.[x] The mise en abyme undergoes translation from one cultural tradition to another and what we lose is their disconnection caused by the literal reading of their dissimilar mimetic surfaces (which are in fact as contiguous intellectually as their digital stuff from which they are made), and the framing of cultural exclusivity.

Like a film, it is a series of frames, each one seen through the other or threaded through the other. "Through" is both a spatial category and one that courts the idea of movement, revelation, a liminal area.  The frame defers the "throughness" of the frame, and through the quality of "throughness" erupts the frame, one can, must, be grasped through the other.  Besides being a spatial category, "through" is also on the edge of meaning, and so, replacing one frame by another in the movement of the gaze (where the gaze is enframed and then breaks out of the frame into another) is the movement we have become familiar with in Web browsing and digital images, where movement is also the creation of meaning. Spatial travel is a semantic journey where the movement of thought is visualized by spatial compartmentalization and vice versa, spatial compartments capture and release, modulate thought.  Browsing is a form of visual thought.  The spatial denotations, "inside" and "outside" the frame measure the trajectory of visual and semantic travel and mark the route of thought.  Both trajectory and route are stored in the memory in an "isolinear" fashion.[xi]

There may be more to this image than just visual jugglery.  The idea of levels: levels of translation, levels of reality, or registers of the concept, each of which require or invite concomitant levels of interpretation, finds its visual expression in the embedded image, and in the mise en abyme. Parallel mental constructions appear in various Islamic theological texts which show the mise en abyme of the Mughal image to be a distant translation of the Plotinian tradition, where there are many references to a series of realities, the most important being the highest reality of the divine archetypes, successively reproduced in a series of emanations of less pure or "less real" versions of reality, the closer one descends towards matter, or sense particulars.[xii]  Rather than visualize these levels of reality in a linear fashion extended over one plane, it is more efficient, perhaps, to visualize each level as a frame within a frame, as in the frames of the Mughal picture.  It is the principle that these different kinds of hierarchies of emanation or consciousness have points along the scale, each of which are a mirror image of the one beneath it.[xiii]  This is most efficiently envisioned as series of embedded images each reflecting the other inside itself, as in monadic arrangements.[xiv] Each internal penetration is equal to a new inner vision or esoteric truth, and so travelling to the center reveals truths (as does adjusting vision to see the embedded image).  Travelling to the center is also analogous to travelling higher in the hierarchy of levels in the quest for truth. Semantically, figuratively and in terms of how we visualize thought in our own minds and literally expressed in spatial terms (and in all the pictorial examples given here and in Web browing), the search for the truth takes us "through" to the "inside".

The process of painting, and in capturing that painting with photography and then framing this photographic image within a digital reality is a process of transforming reality by creating new frames around it but it is also a way of folding thought which, as we have seen, has various applications.  This very process of folding or embedding (whether this is space, reality or thought) is how I want to characterize translation (unfolding within itself).  Embedding has historically specific, culturally specific examples and yet is not specific to one medium of production or production technology or culture. Look, for example at the work of Peter Hovarth, one of his works is reproduced below.[xv]

6168.org, Unexpected Launching of Heavy Objects,
2003 on show at Pace Digital Gallery, October, 2004

Abstract space and the way in which it can be folded up and embedded within itself can be found across different discourses and in different cultural traditions and at different times. Digital images and browsing within frames are traceable to (or parallel with) earlier kinds of visual and mental experience. The process of framing (of lacemaking) is a kind of elaboration of mental activity which requires thought to be folded in upon itself. Ladders of angels, Plotinian emanation systems, and hierarchies of intelligences may also be translated by the literary or visual mise en abyme which similarly self-encloses space, meaning and thought and folds each enclosure of these within itself is exactly what happens with digitisation (translation) of the image and the viewing of it through the browser frame.  Peter Hovarth, Web browsing, The Lacemaker in the still of Chien Andalou and the Mughal painting of frames within frames are all visual translations of the folding of space and thought within itself.  But this brings into focus the process of translation itself which may be characterized thus, as a translation within translation. If translation fails in duplication it is scarred with loss; if it succeeds, then the original is betrayed and counterfeited. Damned if it does and damned if it doesn't, translation carries with it equivocation of a theological tradition.  This may be seen in the writing of the medieval Gnostic Ikhwan al-Safa or brothers of purity, a well-known and widely available source of Muslim Neo-Platonic traditions for centuries:

Here the relationship between painting and sense particulars (the former representing some of the latter) is likened to that between divine archetypes and sense particulars (the latter representing aspects of the former). More to the point, paintings are considered to be copies of copies. Simply put, a clue to the logic behind the mise en abyme here may be found as long ago as Porphyry who reports that Plotinus was supposed to have refused to have a portrait painted of himself, objecting to the notion that he must consent to leave, as a desirable spectacle for posterity, "an image of an image". The concept of an image "three times removed" from reality[xvii] is certainly one that both Western and Islamic traditions are familiar with.  The theological, philosophical and psychological levels suggested by this phrase are translated in the screen grabs of The Lacemaker and in the Mughal Album painting, with their frames within frames that continue the pattern of removes from "reality" and represented reality and embody the interlacing of disciplines and levels of reality.  The screen grab is enlisted in the service of the mise en abyme and drags along the digital era in its wake.[xviii]

Paintings and digital images which frame other images within themselves, which delimit themselves and parcel themselves up, repackage themselves or re-present themselves question reality, nature, the world of visible objects and our perceptions of them. They do not 'imitate' visibilia but follow in the directions of patterns of thought.  The result of the internal transformation of the mise en abyme and one that is implied also in the various transformations of The Lacemaker and the Mughal Album page is that with each internal representation, one temporal specificity is replaced inside another, each step removed from the "previous" it has left behind. Such perceptions of internal time and space are gestures of the traversing of a threshold, which each frame represents.   Each frame is the potential threshold of further meaning, which the mind is drawn towards in search of explanation. The mise en abyme - the  image transformed within the image - is  also a way of paralysing the viewer, for that meaning remains as elusive as the frame beyond the limit of the viewer's sight.  But it also thematizes that sight, for the transversality of each frame represents the transcendence of one way of seeing by another.  In both images the direction of traversing the frame, the "start" and "end" can be reversed, in the sense that the viewer has the choice to complete a journey "into" the frame within frame (which may risk the abyss) or begin there and work outwards leaving the work entirely, withdrawing the eye from the screen to focus on the infinite of something else. The journey is reversible.

The gaze and its engagement within frames is not a thing frozen in time (in a frame) but is a process of becoming within the frames, which mark its trajectory and the thought behind the eyes of the gaze. The series of frames in frames that are looked through (sometimes all at once) is not bounded by material. As in Vermeer's Lacemaker, thought becomes the lace, and the picture a space where dematerialization  of thought meets thought in materialization, as it does for the lacemaker herself.  The train of thought that jumps through the hoops constantly shifts and turns both in time, space and mind (historically, physically and psychologically, respectively).  It is continually lost and found in translation; each translation is a resonance of another. It is not the object itself that is art but its relation to the translation of it, thus what we lose in translation is the art object qua object and the gaining of the relation of the object to its perception. This relationship is the site of art happening and is mimicked quite closely by our contemporary digital literacy, which always seeks meaning inside new frames and is never still.  We live in an "insider culture" of finding the truth in things and inside the inside of things.  Frames within frames are deeply introspective as they are self-centered. This is as much an innerlichkeit of feeling, as it is spatial and ideal but this "insideness" is our home, origin, mind, soul, and singular direction, and by the same token our constant loss, as all of these translations of innerness are continually revised by our contemporary sense of loss, disorientation, Web wanderlust.  Like Tantalus, the frames beyond our reach continually renew our desire. The search for the image within the image is insatiable, for it is continually thwarted by the absence of the beyond, yet continually aroused by the image's bringing of it to mind.   This is part of the "magic" of the image.  

The frames or limits in both cultural traditions are translations of consciousness, time and space, instant and place; the translations are also translations within translation - for they can also repeat themselves, and yet are not quite themselves. They also demonstrate a similar pattern of loss. Both suppress the seed-idea of the author-creator, whether this is the original creator (God) from whom all other realities are contingent, as least in theological exegesis, or the author-artist responsible for the work in other contexts.  In the metamorphoses of The Lacemaker, who is the author-creator? the lacemaker portrayed by Vermeer, Ovid, Arachne, Athena or Luis Buñuel?[xix]  Even the digital image of the lacemaker is pregnant with the myth of Arachne, a myth which speaks of the divine inspiration (or mental image) behind the material image or copy.  And each frame is a copy of a copy of a copy, this could also be said for Velasquez's version of Arachne story in the Prado, Madrid, which more directly deals with frames within frames.   With the Mughal Album painting, in an entirely different cultural and chronological context, the idea of mortal creation as a translation of the "original" persists as mysteriously inside each transformative frame, as much as the mysterious presence, which we do not see outside of the frame, to whom the figure offers his own image. We do not see the work of lace made by the lacemaker, we do not see the patron or viewer of the work to whom the work is offered in the Mughal Album painting. The concept of "creation" is a process of becoming in theological, artistic, and self-reflexive contexts and is twinned by the death or absence of the author/artist continually lost, or excluded from the frame. In the digital era we are authors of the appearance and disappearance of frames; we author the movement of their coming and going, and sometimes what is contained within them if we move from one thought to another within them. 

Buried deep within the grammar of re-production are age-old fears and persuasions. Each frame strikes out and erases the particular author/artist (and the specificity of the medium-moment) to substitute for it an absent but ever present ideal prime mover whose original act is translated by each particular frame but only at the cost of original perfection. Further deconstruction of the phrase "lost in translation" is the différance of perfection, the idea that the Divine word, the original enunciation from which the instances of creation cascade and whisper through time, space and matter is a perfect, ideal point and that anything after it, from it, inspired by it or reflecting it is a less-than-perfect translation. Lost in translation points to the absence or lack of the ideal.  Lost in translation from the Divine to the mortal is the Divine and vice versa.  The grammar of these images and their transformations echo (or Echo) and structure that loss.  Lost in translation carries with it the nostalgia and anxiety of the abyss in the form of the mise en abyme.  If, deep at the root of lost in translation is paradise lost and art an echo of it, there is also the suspicion of a particular kind of divinity deferred: a monotheistic one.  For lost in translation offers the loss of the unique, the one that cannot be copied, reproduced or counterfeited, prostituted, bastardized, vulgarized and enjoyed at the expense of infidelity to the original.  And although it may be said that each translation adds to a polytheistic co-existence of images, they still signal the loss of the one.  This lingers even in the discourse of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (and in the Pop art of Warhol's 'Ad' nauseum).  And Le Chien Andalou is a Surrealist film that, with the filmic reproduction of a photograph of Vermeer's The Lacemaker (and in the sense that it is a still from a series of stills representing the same image in a film strip) suggests not only a critique of the unique and unparalleled work of art promiscuously reproduced in potentially endless contexts but the loss also of the private, personal, dream of the individual, framed by celluloid and an image of the public, collective unconscious. The Surrealists used the 'interpictorial' slippage as a primary tool of their (paranoic critical) method, but they were unable to erase the idea of the original, which remains a highly visible loss in this the still from Le Chien Andalou.

The frame within a frame questions the permanence and stability of that which it frames, and that which it frames is a frame.  Far from being an aporia, the frame within the frame can signify the toppling of the authority of the centre and of the frame itself.  The frames within the frame (and thought embedded inside thought) usurps the authority of center, where the fiction of truth is enclosed. This movement works also on the level of ethical and political discourse.  Something of it has passed into popular culture with films such as The Truman Show with various shots enabling the illusion that the viewer is watching through a CCTV, links framing with capture and the loss of political and personal freedom. The frame signals voyeurism, capture, and is literally, as well as figuratively, the fixing of eye movement not only on what is pictured but the fixing of the eye of the picturer.  The fixing of the eye by the frame is a metaphor for the fixing of reality by the 'thought police' watching.   Through the CCTV we go along with the watcher watching and look through the watcher's eyes, and we are only released from this point of view in the moment we objectify the frame of our own screen, focus on it as an image in itself not merely framing the image, and examine its relation to the fictionalized ones represented within it.  Only when the frame becomes estranged in this way, where we contrast and compare our frame to those projected in the film, do we realize that it is as a prop for an illusionist will to being and that the boundaries of fiction and reality are in fact, drawn by us. 

Without frames thought has no edges, no beginning or end, and no consciousness of itself. With frames in frames (and thought unfolding within itself) we glimpse thought as a process of becoming from within itself, an abstract movement or transformation of intensities inside itself.  The idea of "one frame" is a fiction because it implies that thought is similarly fixed, singular, rather than composite, inscribed, scratched into the earth, made into image and word, fixed in time, defined, authored, given authority, origin, unique, yet no longer living.  But the illusionism of the fixed thought is overcome, questioned, usurped, lost by the comedy of the frame that is repeated, which is a parody of itself and a counterfeit of space. The viewer has a choice: looked at with simultaneous vision the row of frames can be read continuously as the movement of a film, or consecutively, as the staggered and stilted movement of singular stills. It is even possible to imagine experiencing both kinds of vision at the same time, like patting the head while rubbing the stomach in circular movements, or staring at a fixed point while staring in space.  This is where thought as a multiplicity is experienced by the viewer/thinker. One could even say that the awareness of thought becoming multiplicity achieves self-actualization as an unfolding of the virtual in the mind of the viewer. A succinct representation of this is perhaps, the experience of listening to certain kinds of music and the visual travel of the eye beyond thresholds of meaning and space in "free" browsing.

The dynamism of viewing that the Mughal Album painting and The Lacemaker imply and those frames in the work of Peter Hovarth and in the frames of the Web Explorer browser that I have reproduced here are like the images of film, which represents reality as a process, or thought as a process of folding and unfolding. These images are also, in a self-reflexive manner, critiques of representation, in the sense they show that art can and very often does not represent the world but rather, itself, through which we return to the world. The works (moments, minds, media, mythoi) discussed here appear to offer views onto visual rhetoric, metalanguage (or metanarrative), or even the metavisual.  They are representational of themselves at the same time as being representational of something other than themselves. The screen grabs reproduced here and which I have left surrounded by web-browser frames is my creation and continue this self-reflexive translation.  They are both visual and parodies of the visual, they represent sense particulars and they transcend them, being several removes from them, they are also deliberately in and outside of the virtual, putting into focus for our consideration the visuality with which we frame the virtual. 

The frame marks the stream of consciousness and arrests the eye. The frame is the metaphorical "eye" that delimits consciousness with thought producing self-consciousness in order and with which to focus on thinking. Not focusing, not marking, opens the series of frames bringing into view the movement of a multiplicity, synchronicity, and immediacy.  That which is lost is a loss of becoming, marked by frame, being, self, essence, genesis, origin, end, certitude, truth, definition, structure, dichotomy, duality and possibly even death. They mark a canvas, or a map, marked with gestures and signs, they are focused on by the viewer and left behind in the viewer's making and remaking of the image.  These marks are easily retraced and taken up again by the transmuting glance of the viewer who may see the path, the marks along the path, or, in a stereoscopic vision both at once.  And of course, it is possible even to see the self, looking at the self's patterns and routes of looking. There is always the potential for removal, abstraction from the image. Yet, like an eternal return, even at the farthest point of mental abstraction, with the eyes closed, the image comes back to us for other translations, or we seek it out in a stuttering reflex.  All of these operations may be necessary if we are to escape the territorialization of Web visuality.

One of the consequences of having an image in an image (whether in seventeenth century painting or in the visual display of a Windows application in a contemporary sense) is to suggest the transcendence of one reality by another, and indeed one "mode of seeing" by another, so that the overall picture is somehow penetrated or transcended by the second picture portrayed, and this in turn by the third impression "inside" the second. It is not absolute transcendence but a relative one, premised on the passing of the previous frame.  It is easy to assume that each internal picture, each hosting, is "more real" or "less real" than the last, depending on the focus of the viewer and which frame he or she chooses to send to the periphery. In the theological paradigm, each embedded image is equal to a new inner vision or esoteric truth, and so travelling to the center reveals truths (as does adjusting vision to see the embedded image).  Travelling to the center is also analogous to travelling higher in the hierarchy of levels in the quest for the real or truth. We need to ask ourselves if something of this remains in our digital travelling inside images (and images inside images) in contemporary visuality. If Derrida[xx] pointed to the paradox of truth which may be seen to lie inside painting as easily as outside it, it is a question to be asked equally of the frame of the Web browser.

The very process of translating is analogous to travelling in/through/ frames/windows/images, engaging with transformation. Translation as the visual transformation of images inside each other in Web browsing and digital visuality actualizes the movement of thought at the same time as the adjustment of vision while engaging the spatial imagination and questioning the location of truth or reality. Thought is visualized and the visual is thought. The frames within frames are points or stops along a route of a thought journey, which may be linear or non-linear.  Web browsing and the framing of reality and thought inside itself as embedded images are remarkably similar to each other.  The self-penetration of the image by the frame within a frame, which leads to a thought within a thought, or a translation within a translation, is in fact, the self-penetration of the viewing subject.  The viewer is one with where he or she looks, goes, does, thinks, and acts.   

Translation is transformation, travel and the visualization of thought and the thought of visualization. We lose the framing or insulation of thinking, doing, acting, being which are rolled into one in the creative act which translates thought, to eye, to hand and back again, very often lost in this translation is the role of the image in the mind's eye, which has no material existence whatsoever.  It is within the realm of this kind of image that  self-transformation, self-translation and translation within translation occurs, where we lose the duality of the inside and outside and their concomitant and habitual value structures such as center-periphery, subject-object, implicit-explicit, internal and external, esoteric and exoteric and the search for innerness, which I have mentioned.  We truly browse and we don't find because we don't lose because translation is creation and process.  And this in turn is translatable as "self-reflection", the unfolding of thought within itself, framing itself within itself, that is both a movement from one place to another, yet is actually no movement at all, as in Vermeer's lacemaker, who cannot move until we see her move in the mind's eye, as a thinking individual who is making and doing, together, threading the doing with the thinking, as we would do browsing, typing, painting, being in her creation.

Thus movement as self-reflection is, rather, self-production from within the self and is a kind of conceptual movement because, while it 'stays in place' it also travels within itself. The movement of thought within itself is transformed in visual experience as the mise en abyme. A moving picture version which give us a glimpse of the mental image as a process (rather than an idyllic frozen being) is the Norwegian popular music band Röyksopp's video, Eple, directed by Thomas Hilland (2001) which is a self-generative movement that begins with a photograph inside a photograph and keeps travelling into a whole series of further photographs inside the other, continually creating a dizzying journey. Something of the same is evident in Dziga Vertov's Man With A Cinecamera 1929, which uses the camera as a metaphor for the eye and Tarkovsky's Mirror 1974, which gets closer to using the camera as a metaphor for the idea of the abstract mental image that has no material existence. In the Eple example, we have a thought journey within itself clearly signalled by frames within frames that is continually in a process of flux within itself. Its movement is a simulation of possible speeds and patterns of the creation of mental images in the viewer in the sense that it tracks the rhythms of envisioning rather than the images themselves.  The premise, again, is image creation from within itself.

The idea of translation within translation is translated and folded once more. The theological parallel with this improvisation, or self-creation (which in a sense, makes digital visual and doing experience lose its exclusive rights as a new or unique experience) is that Divine creation unfolds from within the Divine itself.  The Divine is a cloth from which is formed all the folds of creation, even though mortals care only to see the illusions of thinghood: demarcations, divisions, differences, or indeed, the folds or frames of existence.[xxi]  And in the same way, the viewing of digital images and "travelling" from one to the other in contemporary visual experience are illusions, for are they not reducible to their technological reality, as pixels and as light emitting diodes?  As images based on this invisible substructure, they conceal with illusions the unfolding within itself of the same material of which they are made, as thought unfolding within thought.  And it is remarkable that the hummingbird's wings, so easily translatable as the invisible refresh rate of the screen are again translatable as the jerky rapidity of thought in the hyperactivity of an attention deficit syndrome, or REMs twitching for eye candy.  Lost in the translation of images represented by frames within frames in all contexts outlined above is an horror vacui not only of space as fixed but also of the kind of infinity where thought stands still, or is fixed.  We lose in the visual experience in the digital age the medieval fear of God's absolute loneliness in the vertiginous infinitude of self-reproduction, as the goddess Arachne is lost in Vermeer's Lacemaker, and in Le Chien Andalou.  Lost also is the author who continually quotes from others and who translates continually inside other translations, moving inside images within images, self-generating within the phenomenology of Web visuality.  

The vast metaphorical power of the medium of the Web drawing in its net anything between the atom and God creates the illusion of a visual universe and the reality of a virtual one. And the wanderlust for travel between the two is as insatiable as it is ephemeral, always becoming, each frame springing up anew as instantly as it dies, the motion of the viewer-traveller through frames and frames within frames constantly appears as the folds of a personalized vision, appearing to put experience and virtual experience into stereoscopic focus but nevertheless, each is refreshed at the same rate, at the level of the diode. Only the verfremdung (estrangement) of reflexivity allows the invisibility of this substructural reality to come into view: when computer screens are filmed and broadcast on television, the conflict of refresh rates allows us to see what normally remains unseen. The visual translation shows us what we lose. This conflict is a rupture in the space-time continuum, a temporal anomaly that is brought to mind by the screen within the screen, bringing together different refresh rates which clash.  A broader range of temporal anomalies could be achieved if the computer screen framed and broadcast by the TV is fixed on a digital image of the still of The Lacemaker in the film Le Chien Andalou.  Another estrangement exercise is when a Web user puts the word, "God" into a search engine.  This is possibly as meaningless or as meaningful as putting the words "I" into the search box, or even "diode" but the levels of metaphorical power attached to such performative acts remain, and they are as endlessly translatable as they are lost.  Frames within frames, thought unfolds within thought, translation unfolds within translation, the Web unfolds within itself, as we continually recreate ourselves causing there to be a map of loss we are only just beginning to unfold.