By Tara Kyle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Thousands of world languages will die out before the turn of the century — but Thursday night in Chelsea, New Yorkers will get a rare chance to explore some innovative ways of saving them.
Google will open the doors to its headquarters at 5:30 p.m. Thursday to allow the public to explore an exhibit called "Digital Art @ Google: Ancient Stories with Modern Technologies" and hear a talk by National Geographic photographer and fellow Chris Rainier.
This is the third, and final, chance for the general public to see the multimedia exhibit, created in collaboration with the Project Room for New Media, before it closes on Dec. 31.
"Of the 7,000 different languages spoken, there are 7,000 different ways of looking at the world," Rainier said, noting that his mission is to fight against the possibility that, "we will wake up one day in a monochromatic world of Starbucks and strip malls."
To that end, Rainer travels to corners of the world including New Guinea, India, Paraguay and the American Southwest, training locals to use computer technologies, still images and video to preserve and share their languages and traditions.
The exhibit features photos from those journeys, as well as two videos. Rainier describes one, a black and white short called "Sacred," as an "emotional postcard to the heart," filmed over 10 days at Angkor Wat, Cambodia.
Visitors to the exhibit can also interact with a pair of computer programs created by multimedia artist and Google speech recognition researcher Andrew Senior.
One, "Shibboleth," allows users to compare pronunciations of words including tomato, castle, and Scheveningen (a Dutch town) as they are pronounced in Staffordshire, England, or Hyderabad, India. The program's title comes from a passage in the Book of Judges, where one tribe uses the word's pronunciation as a test for uncovering enemies in the midst — members of the neighboring tribe could not pronounce the sound "shi."
"You can impersonate some accents, but these things are deeply ingrained," Senior said, noting that the brain losing its ability to reproduce unfamiliar sounds after the age of two. "We're always betraying our origins."
Another program, which Senior calls "Machine Translations," explores how a passage from the Book of Genesis changes as it is inputted into Google Translator from one language to another and back again. The results resemble a children's game of telephone, because true translation, Senior said, "is inherently impossible."
Finally, the exhibit features an installation by Paul "DJ Spooky" Miller. Miller's Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation brings artists to the South Pacific Island of Tanna, where they work with locals to create contemporary art and employ 21st century technologies that can enhance island life.
The artists, as well as curator Nina Colosi, hope that the multifaceted nature of the exhibit will help visitors come away with a sense of both the importance of preservation and the potential afforded by contemporary technologies.
"Languages can be interpreted in many different ways," Rainier said. "It's not about what's being spoken, but what's being heard."
The artist talk for "Digital Art @ Google: Ancient Stories with Modern Technology" will be held at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at 75 Ninth Avenue. Interested attendees must RSVP via e-mail at the Project Room website.
School groups can also request opportunities to visit before the exhibit closes on Dec. 31.
