The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

Eras/sure

What we're doing produces (is the production of?) artifacts (processes?) -
video, audio files, live video and audio performance, online video and
audio performance, live performance, texts, programs, images - everything
in other words that doesn't rely on offline material construction on the
order of photographs, etchings, paintings, engravings, sculpture, instal-
lations, multiples, offline books. What we're doing relies on both process
and electronic transmission; the Access Grid works for example are proce-
sses resulting in various digital formats and copies but other- wise no
hard copy. What we're doing is scholarly to the extent that it examines
the self-body-image - not the image in terms of symptomologies or emotion-
al processes, etc., but the very inhabiting of the body itself - something
that it's almost impossible to quantify or describe, Levinas, Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty notwithstanding. The work reconfigures the very foundations,
backgrounding, of experience. What would a world be like within which
movement and memory structures were drawn out by the substitution of tan-
gent for sine, structures that were then redrawn in to the experiential?
We have no interest in display or aesthetics beyond that which tilts or
topples presuppositions. Our scholarship as applied to examination is
irreducible, irreproducible, irresistible, irregardless; our scholar
requires your presence, near or far, in relation to the camera, micro-
phone, screen, performance space, online node. What we're doing is neither
science nor psychology, but an intermingling which insists on the history,
memory, and inhabiting of the human or otherwise body. We will use any
available technology and performativity to arrive at the place of this
body, the place of mind, history, and memory. We will eliminate the
preposition 'of' in phrasing 'memory of,' 'history of,' 'psychology of,'
'philosophy of.' We will conjoin coupling into flux, striation, flow,
emission, spew. We will consider sources only as aftermath, and destina-
tions only as they disappear in the rearview mirror of the mind. We insist
that our knowledge is populist, open to everyone, that memory may be
seeing, that looking my be thinking, that observing may be philosophy,
that observing is always philosophy. We emphasize the look of the world is
its origin all the way down, that looking requires nothing whatsoever,
neither technology nor organ. We will dwell within breathing, breathe all
possible worlds, collapse them with a gentle insistence on continuous
withdrawal. We present artifacts and processes from the flattening of
these and other surfaces. We understand that artifacts are carapaces, that
a certain hardening always occurs in transmission, that hardening is never
the thingings or processings themselves, nor thingings or processings
otherwise. We neither consider this an aesthetics, nor an aesthetics of
withdrawal, not even a silence or silencing; instead we might murmur some-
thing about background once again, not even that, except under erasure. We
operate under erasure, our work is under erasure, always beyond the Pale,
always beneath consideration. Consideration is under erasure, everyone
operates as if the Pale has disappeared, thought is under erasure ...