Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0208271648550.11959-100000@panix1.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: Re: The Meaninglessness of Meaninglessness (fwd)
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 16:49:16 -0400 (EDT)
Might be of interest here - Alan ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 16:03:28 -0400 From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@PANIX.COM> Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU> To: POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Subject: Re: The Meaninglessness of Meaninglessness One thing of interest here - at least for me it touches on the methodology I'll employ at times - is Eliza and the ability to rework Eliza. Eliza is available in emacs (under 'doctor'), and it's possible to go into the doctor program itself, and alter things - I rewrote it as a Nikuko text - which I then used as a catalyst for producing work and answers in relation to a litany of seduction that was the final result. Chance operations, expert programs, are there for the modification/transformation - a MOO is of course the best-known example of that. And all of this is tremendously exciting - the ability to take a world and remake it, to create a dialectic between one's own desires and interests, and what the machinic is bringing to life. The conflict or coherence that results becomes part and parcel of the content; it's neither one way nor another. The same goes for chance operations - the julu/julua/parent/etc. perl scripts I use as catalysts for writing on occasion all have vocabulary which I can change - even create a work within the vocabulary itself. This modification leads to a similar dialectic. Even awk scripts can be used in this way - I can write a text in which each line is a letter or dipthong substitute, for example, then begin with a shorter ur-text that organizes the other. None of this means that the result has to be final, unless there is a reason, aesthetic or philosophical, to give the result up to the machine. But it provides a way to see in/through/ structure, to accommodate and critique structure, to even create a political economy of structure (as the 'character essay' pieces I make, do - since each word + its punctua- tion is used only once). The world is violent, extraordinary, filled with wonder, noisy, ahd chaotic (both in the strict senses of the terms); working with these elements is, in part, an attempt to make, proclaim, enunciate, meaning and a sememe within forces that are somewhat beyond our control. To answer another question - the philosophy of publishing daily - this is a philosophy of distribution; the writing is done online, using online programs that I write or modify; I write in a shell account, which means there are up to a hundred other users on the same machine - I can see what they're doing - and the distribution, like the production, is naturally electronic. Rightly or wrongly, I also see my work as central to the subject - Poetics - of this list; for example, the MOO piece sent out the day before yesterday with the result of interacting with three MOOs in turn - on two of them, I was Nikuko, and on one, Alan - and so the dialog spread across domains and worlds. And in the other piece, the same day, the one dealing with mutilation - I did a series of "greps" on my entire body of work - all of the online texts I've written since 1994 - and pulled out the lines with "mutilat" in them; these lines were then arranged and modified in accordance with current politics, which are a horror that must be stopped at any cost. And this way of working - harves- ting previous work, looking for patterns, etc. - is similar to a kind of dream interpretation - reading through a huge mind-storm of material, finding the thinking-structures, topic-based, analyzing them, working with them, opening them up once again. This harvesting is entirely computer- dependent; what I did would take a week to do manually, for example. All of this - moving among virtual worlds, distributing on the fly, harvesting the work of previous writing - seems to me highly germane to the topics of this list - collusions among distribution systems, protocols, computers, programs, routers, bodies of previously-written work, online virtual worlds, etc. - - Alan, wandering Work at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt Older at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm CDROM of collected work 1994-2002 available: write sondheim@panix.com