The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

The Beautiful Throbbed Emanentation


The following is a culmination of certain directions associated with mo-
tion capture - in particular, operating too near and too far from the
receiving antenna, with mixed sensors. In both positions, the configur-
ation generates furious behavior as clusters of sensors shoot to ragged
infinities and back again. Heads may detach and the cartoon integrity
returns as such. The reading, however, is different, as is the jectivity;
the reading is external, jectivity internal. The reading searches for
coherency: which body belongs with which organ? Jectivity follows organ,
head, and limb paths, identification with approaching, consummating,
withdrawing, churning. This is Brownian motion, but radically integral.

So what is being modeled? For one thing, slow-simple movement, carefully
seducing, caressing, antenna and sensor alike. For another, electronic
jitters which threaten to break apart the world.

In all of these instances there are two or three figures; at times, they
duplicate or fall behind or beyond one another; at times they ingest one
another; at times flail uselessly apart; at times, entangle. They cohere
and the video/project/ion is one of cohering, hysteric communality at the
catastrophic limit. Sheave-skins, which are usually reserved for too-close
caress or voyeurism in Second Life, split constantly here; wounds heal,
reopen, the body channels the body. Mind-only emptiness, no mind running
these emanents into the ground.

Violence, abjection, arousal, caress, tumescence, thickening, cutting of
the sheaves. Sheave-figures which I am sure will soon be independent of
our desire or construct.

(This is some of the most advanced video/mocap work I've done; I'm always 
amazed that both beauty and wonder can come out of such poverty. It's the 
machines which are talking, which are rubbing against one another, which parlay 
communication into visionary ekstasis. I must learn, I continue to learn, how 
to listen, how to see, what is proffered, what is not within my powers of 
conjuration. Magic is magic because it always come from the Other. I have lost 
expectation.)

Abjection is the most difficult. How to dis/comfort and fetishize, hold
and release simultaneously. These emanants do this naturally, as Azure
Carter, original model, follows suit.

http://www.alansondheim.org/throbbed.mp4

Abjection is the most difficult, less so as the camera moves in, cuts through 
sheaves. For the viewer there is the level of the subterranean bvh code in 
dialog with the exigencies of Poser models, but there are also levels of organs 
and affect, and it is the breasts and hands, high-speed maternal display, that 
provide tremulous scaffolding:

http://www.alansondheim.org/wideinternals.mp4


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