The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

August 11, 2008


Inside the Sphere, description and theory


Several molecular engines within the aegis of the sphere; out of world
anomalous behavior seems to have slowed. I'm running Second Life on my
Asus eeepc 701; contrary to what I've read, the installation went in
flawlessly and SL runs reasonably well in the Debian Etch environment. I
made a few minor changes, placing the cache on an external flash card for
example; the SL client wouldn't run from the card, but the cache is fine.
To make up for the 512 meg memory, I increased the cache to 600 meg and
turned media off. Everything runs, albeit slowly; the image is clear
enough to allow some house-cleaning on the road.

Inside the sphere, since it's self-contained - an 'environment' seems to
form, one that appears self-bounded. In other words, there is always
inscription; if it's not inherent in a given virtual world, it's going to
be created as soon as one begins to configure anything. An object carries
structure; even anomalous or ghostly spews or objects create an uncanny
domain (appear to tap an uncanny domain).

In other words, inside the sphere, you don't see the sphere, flat black
against nothing. So the objects are there, but you don't necessarily think
they're _somewhere._ Where they are is circumscribed by their presence.
They seem to be a closed manifold. There doesn't seem to be anything
beyond them. The manifold seems differentiable. The ring streams, though,
seem to go somewhere; they're vectors, directed line segments; they seem
cut off; they disappear; perhaps there's something to that disappearance,
after all. One moves around and among objects and rings and whatever one
might consider particles and objects, but it's difficult to move around
here without breaking the fragility of the illusion, what might be
considered a second-order illusion.

What's presenced within the sphere, a simulacrum of an organism, simultan-
eously passive and generating; the repetition of a rectangle defined only
as a process (again, a second-order process within the processes/protocols
of Second Life itself), moving and disappearing, clearly the result of an
other movement drawing and drawn in three- dimensional space; a signal or
memory of a signal: A memory of a signal is a signal; a signal is always
memory. How clear that is in the sphere! How clearly understood!

And such is the meaning-memory of organism and the murmuring of organism,
even in a digital-granular domain such as this one.

http://www.alansondheim.org sleee, esl, essl series (most recent jpgs)

To access the Odyssey exhibition The Accidental Artist:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22

Teleport from the cone to the skysphere.

To access the Odyssey exhibition The Accidental Artist:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22
==========================================================================


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:06:37 -0700
From: Google Alerts <googlealerts-noreply@google.com>
To: sondheim@panix.com
Subject: Google Alert - "Alan Sondheim"


Google News Alert for: "Alan Sondheim"

Two Texts by Alan Sondheim. Number One.
Wired News - USA
By Bruce Sterling August 11, 2008 | 3:08:50 AM I have revolved the panels
of the building eternally and they may jump as well from place to place.
...
See all stories on this topic

Two Texts by Alan Sondheim. Number Two.
Wired Blogs - USA
... 2008 | 3:14:39 AM (((I rather get the impression that this is
found-art rather than an entirely original text, but given that this is
Alan Sondheim, ...
See all stories on this topic

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