Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0202230052260.5389-100000@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Minneapolis evening performance residue 2/22/02:
Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2002 00:52:42 -0500 (EST)
- Minneapolis evening performance residue 2/22/02: (I performed, then Miekal And. I ran video/still images, wrote the following text; all this was projected from a laptop - the text written live - sometimes 2-3 videos would play at once - the text brackets the audio-visual.) my work's concerned with language, sexuality, the virtual body and subjectivity - all of these elements interacting online and off - i'm concerned with what happens beneath the surface, the coding, the psychoanalytics, the substances i'm concerned, i'm very concerned thank you! It's r-rated, not X-rated - the difference I think is based on penetration? I'm not really sure... I do codework and what might be considered virtual -body work online. For example - sorry about the errors - they accumulate - for example the mime piece I showed yesterday - please exit through that door over there!!! <===== sure!!! well, we know nothing about mime. we do know that hmmm... there are glass boxes and ropes and things and sometimes the hula =- you've got a bit of all this here - it's like a language mapped across the body - for that matter the hula is really an exact mapping, azure's smoking again - down the stairs, up the stairs, etc. etc. so this seemed a bit boring and we sent the mimes to hell - heh heh the fire's really hot! but the digital layer does add something else to it - a kind of sign imposed on the body from outside - it's through the framework - it's not present in the space we're performing in... these are darker works... about a year ago we were at the experimental television center in owego upstate ny and were able to create a piece i'd wanted to do for a long time - exploring literal writing on the body - in a kind of presencing of both sexuality and inscription - that comes next - that's here - the sound triggers the cameras through an analog synthesizer... we write chinese ideograms on each other - from an early period of the development of the characters - we come together, erase them through our contact - we're apart - we stamp each other with hanko - one at the beginning and one at the end - I seem to be making less typing mistakes than usual for this kind of stuff. i showed this in Buffalo and Loss Glazier thought that I was hmmm... like it was a big movie done but you know better, Minneapolis! anyway the ideograms are those for breath, circulation, respieration (heh!), turning, - and above the genitals, a symbol for negation - it's the same in contemporary Japanese - I'm in the wrong font here... I'll skip about - to show how this works... Azure's a lot younger than me but we're married. we showed some images in the university in Florida and the students thought she was my daughter... you can have absolutely no idea what that led to. this piece with foofwa d'imobilite also uses the five camera setup - he's a brilliant dancer from switzerland... we did a number of works deconstructing ballet and emphasizing both the labor and the sexuality involved - then of course there are the extensions of these body issues through mathematics - but these are stationary images - we'll just use the sound - that was a bit of a lacanian mystery with all those symbols... but i began to get interested (I began to get interesting? Not on your life) - I began to get int. etc. in transforming images into mathematical functions and then modifying them through a program called Mathematica - it produced the result you see above left but also could modify existing digital images - In all of them the body's surrounded by mathesis, a mathematical space that heightens the contrasted areas... In the movie above left - those are Azure's nipples mapped onto a mathematical framework, turned into a three-dimensional mapping which is then deconstructed by transforming positions and parameters... Azure stood at the end of the dance piece; it was important that she stood - it brackets the relationship of the males who were in a kind of competition - the fast guitar - the dahdahdah - the dance - as if we could overpower each other - the vertical positioning changed everything - well, I worked through a character called Nikuko - "meat girl" in Japanese - who started off as a snack-bar girl and ended up as a demiurge. Azure played nikuko and I played Doctor Leopold Konninger in a series of texts, videos, soundworks, and performances. Nikuko would pirouette for Doctor Leopold Konninger or anyway as you can see a lot of the work has to do with bodily abjection as well - the relationship between the body and various forms of discomfort... what happens if you map flesh onto asteroids? or onto three-dimensional space itself - creating convoluted spaces... - all of this - this section - based on the near earth object (NEO) email list I belong to - warning me, through NASA, of whatever asteroids are about to hit the planet. there are also images of flybies (?) flybyes of asteroids, al silent of course - so I worked on making them work for me... this is part of a series of works using Nikuko and Dr LK - produced at the same place using analog synthesizers - they were run as a series at Millennium Film in NY - you see the references to piroettes here.. she dances and dances for the doctor. the two of them are locked together like gears or cams in a localized sexual economy written by george grosz - there's no escape from it/them, from the obsessiveness - how did we get here? the deconstruction of the body, of inscription on or around the body, of ballet, of writing on the body, of an incipient sexuality, of machinery and functional gears... we could end with a couple of things - Miami Everglads and the welcome movie and then there was the mess of the Everglades and the violent sexuality of Miami and its highest crime rate in the country and the corrupt university and civic government and and and and about Miami, as someone said, Trust me you don't want to go there but this isn't about Miami so much as about deconstruction and the body and inscription and sex and language and and and and and ... just one more runthrough - the "new one" btw (by the way) refers to a computer i got from the place to use while I was there - it's not THIS machine - THIS machine is a lot better - I can really DREAM on this machine - and as you see it allows a lot of movies to play at once. testing one two three can you hear me? testing one two three can you hear me? I'm azure Carter's neurotic husband, welcome to - Cyberspace (If I were Miekal I could make that really big and move all over the page! Alan .. _