Reinterpreting the Book

The Phonebook is a novel with a rather narrow plot but with many protagonist, said Arthur c. Danto about the post structural rethinking of our visual and communication language. In this post, I tried to gather all the bible modifications I found so far.



The largest project I found was the Lolcat Bible Translation Project, an entire, comprehensive modification, spoof of the original text of the bible to some sort of satirical, contemporary language full with deprivations, and satirical, obscure references against the original context and usage.


By replacing the deity with the really obscure idea of LOLcat (Laughing Out Loudly cats - which anything funny about, with cats, an aesthetic paradigm emerging lately) the creators are trying to to point out any possible inconsistence in the original text, making its original intents as inconclusive as possible.
But lest stop for the sake of this LOLcat paradigm for a little: being funny has a completely different meaning in the context of the blogger sphere in this case. Being funny is being satirical, and usually is has nothing to do with the original context of the image and/or text material. The same way as Susan Sontag defined camp, this funniness could be announced as a new form of aesthetic production, as it has the same attitude towards bad, or "unimportant", "funny" as the cultural practicer's of camp did to their subjects.





A related project is Know Your Bible, which I found at the satirical, atheist website Russel's Teapot, which is a close reading and recontextualizing of the original text. The verses chosen are interpreted from a anti-religious point of view, ambiguities, inconsistencies and revolting elements of the bible (propagating domestic violence, rape, murder, as an example) . An image is taken for every entry as an illustration, and these images give a large potential in them - they are conjuring up images familiar from the global new networks and image production and turning this against the text and subtext of the bible. The images are already familiar, all we have just to do is to associate them with the bible and the believers, or at least thats what the collection suggest.
Russell's Teapot website hence turns to be one of the most aggressive and successful atheist, anti-religious website. I have to also admit, this site has a clear political orientation, and not employ an almost neutral notion of satire, like the others, rather use the images for political reasons.

And again, the Brick Testament, a satirical compendium of Bible events made from LEGO parts - the creator of this project is clearly reinterpreting the bible in order to distance the viewers as far away from the spiritual interpretations of the text as possible. In my previous post, I described it, how he does this, here I would like to point out a stark example, the Two fates of Judas. Not yet a Borgesian tale, but almost.




An interesting, less satirical, but more artistic reinterpretation of the Bible comes from the artist, Neva Elliott, who, in the project titled The Elliott Condensed Bible rearranged the original words of the bible into some strange order based on the verbs common in this book. Do, Do Not, Shall, Shall not phrases taken from their original context are in some way making a satirical statement, but at least a atheist, non believer one: the bible is only a book, not a holy entity and can be reinterpreted as any other literature.