Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0205072203020.26477-100000@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: performance text improvisation
Date: Tue, 7 May 2002 22:03:23 -0400 (EDT)
- performance text improvisation - New Jersey Institute of Technology - 5/7/02 (not satisfied with this; it lacks the structure of the others; we've just arrived in new york; i was following suit; i was doing my best - thanks to Chris Funkhouser who brought me - i was trying my hardest) === we're all waiting for a sign... these are asteroids, camera fly-byes (fly-bies?) - fly bees... across three-dimensional spaces created in Blender - www.blender.nl 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 about messes, tangles, messiness, entanglement ... all of this work is tangled,confused - these images are from the everglades. we went into them about 2-4 times a wekk or so, thats week, that's that's - not wekk... i was interested in messiness and the way that everything was both about desire - for us, obsessiveness, and at the same time an impenetrable ecosystem - the longer we were there, the more we understood about the images - about what we were seeing - the intersection of varis various biomes.... all playing into notinos on notions of language 9had too much coffee * just got in from miami) - this is mime movie - azure (myh partner) and I mimed for the camera - working through what were the "usual" black box - getting out of glass, swimming, up and down stairs, that sort of thing - so that what's present is a kind of languaging, no? a language of mime that's otherwise silent; this was getting poretty boring to us so we sped things up and went to hell... it fascinates me to be able to work withdifferent rates of movement/voice in all of this - as if there are different worlds emerging. early on we did some work emphasizing this with foofwa d'immobilite, who had danced with merce cunningham - arranged a piece in which myh voice triggered his traditional ballet movement to the point of exhaustion... i've been fascinated by dance and its relation to desire, and a way to think through the body without spoken language or discretge symbols - you have the same difficulties here that you do with film "language" - what constitutes a wor d or phoneme, how do0es tradition play out when tradition is something that escapes discrete symbols? on top of which dance is HARD - difficult to do - there's labor involved - and there's labor in spoken language and written language and production/distribution in every sense of the term.... so we were pushing for this - what amounted to a deconstruction of dance through dance - turning dance (like everything else here) into a mess - how does one create/approach a mess? we were playhing charactgers that are avatars I use online - nikuko the russian ballet dancer and doctor leopold konninger, a name that came to me in a dream. konninger comes out of Grosz's drawings of pre-war and otherwise Germany - he has a monacle but I never wore one. he and nikuko were involved together in a round-robin relationship - she would dance for him and he would pay her - it was a continuous pirouette - again the labor/money context is clear - here is a part of the sequence - all of this earlier work, about a year ago or so, revolves around body and flesh - issues of skin and interior - in florida, the everglades dominated. there are few tourists at this point; they're almost abandoned at times. you can walk in the middle of the night through miles of swamp and no one is around at all. you'll find insects and other fauna you've never seen before. at first you focus on safety and alligators and snakes; then you begin to descend into the layers, moving more and more into a submerged landscape almost out of J.G. Ballard, a landscape of surreal dimensions. These bugs you see for example - I have not been able to find them in any book at all - no one knows what they are. This butterfly is the atala, an endangered species, extremely rare - this goes on and on - from the fauna then back to the landscapes themselves which change subtlely the park is created from organisms - there are no geological features readily visible; everything you see is alive, beneath your feet, or on occasion overhead .. we played obsessively out here, first filming ourselves in the environment, merging sexuality, then trying to read the codes and then finding the codes deeper and deeper, almost as if they were a series of circular passages in a moo or mud... eventallly we produced SEALS - based on ideograms referencing breath, sexuality, circularity, exhaustion - these have become a foundation or rather reference for the rest of the work - in seals, there are five cameras; they're triggered by the sound. the man writes on the woman, seals her it with a chop/hanko. the woman writes on the man, filling his body with signs; the sign for negation just above the genitals. the man writes on the woman, just as otherwise. the woman seals the man. but before the sealing: erasure, as the bodies flood each other, erasing symbol/image simultaneously - again the relationship to desire and language is obvious. my work is idiotic; it covers the same ground over and over. but it's clever in its use of masquerade and disguise, as if new things were being constantly discovered. On the left you just saw the death of a digital camera in the everglades after swamping a canoe... the rest of the images are with another - with quicktime, sound moves from foreground channel to foreground channel; it can be set otherwise, but muddies... on the left, black mangrove thicket in the northern everglades. this is our ever-popular welcome to miami film. (We hated miami.) cattail swamp - which is useful for cleaning out pollutants as part of the everglades reconstruction project... as if we're on ecstasy or as if we're collapsing.... how does this fit together? it doesn't - or rather it's a question of approaching things. I'm intersted in that - how one approaches things, particuolarly things that are a mess - messy relationships, messy bodies, messy environments - which of course begs the question - one has to learn to listen to the begging - one has to study it.. my work has moved in a strange way out of language. it's always been at war with words, with thinking language through and through, using shell accounts, unix/linux, and hundreds of editing/coding tools - well dozens, anyway. but faced with bodies, with desire, with tangles, how does language work - without listening, and without the foreclosing that language of course always implies? it's better not to name things for a while - particularly in these difficult political times when names are useful for the raveling of hatreds on a universal scale... these are images of a desiccated lake in the everglades dry season - a tricolored heron hunting - a coastland prairie here - black mangrove roots - crfab carapace, marsh hare, turkey vulture, cypress dome - the environment changes over a height of inches - the cypress dome is partially submerged. the highest point in the everglades is four feet - where you might have pinelands or hardwood hammocks. this is the cypress dome, wandering through one. and these are exotic mating muscovie ducks and we'll end with this I think? already a foreign intrustion (these ducks) into the everglades, rendering everything problematic once again - _