Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0803011821440.3377@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Frontier (additional after 1st two paragraphs)
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2008 18:22:07 -0500 (EST)
Frontier (additional after 1st two paragraphs) I like to believe I'm working on a frontier and all I can tell you is what's on the normative side of things; the rest is yet to be seen, unabsorbed. Once brought in from the Pale, it's of lesser interest, but beyond the Pale there's nothing but the agony of shadows. Defuge takes over and the frontier, always an imaginary, shudders and reconvenes. The videos/choreographies exist between human and human - someone was there making the original files with motion capture, and someone is at the other end, watching and using them once again. The virtual is a shadow of the real, the real is a shadow of the virtual, and within the true world superimpositions, gestures, and the fading of ontologies characterize what remains of the fixity of inscriptive practices of the classical and modern ages. Distinctions are blurred through embedding and filtering. Avatars and humans - together, emanents - are embedded in online virtual worlds, in spaces which are simultaneously physical/inert/analog and virtual/mobile/ digital. Every seeing, every being, is a filtering; existence and copula are interwoven. A current collection of texts is called Messays; in a Messay, there's no leading sentence, no orderly sequence of ideas, no summings-up, no conclusions. The essay is to classical narratology as the messay is to future true world genres which seep into one another, head- less and tailless - meandering on the one hand, problematic obeisance to protocols on the other. What we started with is the body which is inscribed with scars, scratches, tears, wounds, blemishes, abrasions, cuts, and all other debris carrying analogic history into the symbolic. What we continued with are tattoos, incisions, fashion, gesture, languagings, and what continually emerges is the body harboring technology as self retreats or withdraws, puckers, from the wild symphonics of externally-applied filters digging ever deeper. The walk or arm-swing becomes gesture becomes anysign becomes trade-off, translation, transformation, exchange, interoperability, reified territor- ialization. One sits at a console and breathes through sheave-skin, another begins vortex stage-center with flesh-electric, a third wanders memory of others airless, unbreathing, peripheral wanderings mediated at mind's back. From the airless, flesh-breathers are attracted, gather, project and introject, their selves flowing, flooding, abjecting, full of scent and coagulation. We take our tiny community of people up and down mountains, in and out of clubs and iced fields, across the chiasm of cut bodies and body cuts, mines and other extractive industries across the flesh of land and bodies. What we bring back is always new, even if only in the slightest detail, a brush of the hand or turn of the head that was never seen before. And we keep to our goal of understanding filtering and embedding better than before, and understanding bodies in the always future anterior world, the true world of emanents and anysign where we're living, breathing, writing and wryting, this and any future day. http://www.alansondheim.org/performance1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance2.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance3.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance4.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance5.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance6.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance7.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance8.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance9.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance10.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance11.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance12.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance13.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance14.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/performance15.jpg (notes for upcoming Millennium show, NYC, 3/15, details later)