Visit the Rosetta Screen website.

Original Project Description:

"Rosetta" was designed by Mel Chin and Haun Saussy as one of some seventy-five artworks to be included in the new Martin Luther King, Jr., Public and University Library in San José, CA. It will consist of an enlarged (9 x 6feet) reproduction of the British Museum's famous Rosetta Stone, in glass etched with Egyptian and Greek characters, and set into a wall in the library's main lobby. Behind the glass is a further layer of text: an array of LED lamps that will continually display selections from a multilingual anthology of writing from San José and the surrounding area. "Rosetta" thus conjoins the permanence of stone and the ephemerality of screen flicker in a paradoxical object designed, above all, to draw attention to the plurality of languages and literary traditions now flourishing in San José.

The glass screen and its surround are being built in Mel Chin's studio in North Carolina. The LED array will be temporarily installed in the SHL. Over the coming year, we will compile the anthology of local writing, in collaboration with San José workshops and a seminar at San José State University.

As a piece of art designed for display in a public building, "Rosetta Screen" is about the public: it will provide its users an unfamiliar glimpse of their own world. Many residents of San José probably do not think of Silicon Valley as a literary center, and even if they do, they may be unaware of the existence of poets writing in Urdu, playwrights working in Vietnamese, Spanish-language novelists, and so forth. The anthology and its display should have the social consequence of bringing these writers and readers into contact with one another, stimulating curiosity, perhaps even sparking mutual translation projects the products of which might, in turn, be fed into the "Rosetta" database.

Core Personnel:

• Haun Saussy (Professor of Asian Languages and Comparative Literature, Stanford)
• Mel Chin (artist, New York)
• Robert Batchelor (Assistant Professor of History, Georgia Southern University)
• Anne Balsamo (Techno-Humanist, also Visiting Researcher, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford)
• Allen Beye Riddell (undergraduate student, Stanford)
• Melissa Catherine Leavitt (graduate student, Stanford)
• Jason Escalante (graduate student, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley)