The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

Sex and missile, details and mistakes


People say I should document the installation, oh but how? Now a sexand-
missile component has been added for example above the granite well in the
courtyard, best documented from within the well, looking up into the night
sky perhaps, but this component is miniscule, hardly present, a detail in
chaos which grows day and night.

Now perhaps to document would be to remove the entire installation and
store? Perhaps it would be to list the details of every file and script,
from texture to repetitive avatar motion. Worlds are always already
stillborn; they fall apart when examined and it's impossible to examine
them in the first place, that's called death.

So here is a detail which is flattened, the same way that levels are flat-
tened; time is now bound to it, bound to the file or to the clock driving
the re/presentation of the file. The file is released by virtue of history
- in other words, the history of the (absent) camera and its (previous)
movements; there's nothing to guarantee the linearity of the original /
originary time, which might well have been suppled, however coalesced into
the machinic equivalence of frames in the final construction.

One might then think of this as the memory of a non-existent documenta-
tion, therefore the stand-in or doubling of a documentation which was at
first full, fecund, replete, liquid and malleable. And you might find the
documentation, at least at the moment, this moment, within the thing
itself, the installation still current, the sexandmissile for example
waiting for your presence to explore in three, if not four, dimensions,
what has clearly been laid out, so recently.

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

Second instance, third mistake (for it is all in error, what has been set
in stone or file) from a particular vantage point, this looping which
curls over the screen, in fact might be considered an efflorescence of the
imaginary.

http://www.alansondheim.org/loopy.mov

And third instance, third mistake, when something appears by chance (by
chance from the viewpoint of the subject) in-camera, some anomaly or
instant, captured by the built-in camera (not screen capture; controls and
cursor are eliminated) - as if these details were there for the taking,
not the result of chaotic happenstance.

http://www.alansondheim.org/ blue jpgs

All this documentation over nothing.

( Slurl http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22 )