The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

Alan Sondheim

uqbar. media art culture e Rinascimento Virtuale
Vi invitano all'apertura di /Invite you at the Opening of

Alan Sondheim aka Alan Dojoji

Friday, January 23 - Sunday, January 25, 2009
(10 PM CET - 01 PM SLT)
ARENA EX.IT slurl:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Experience%20Italy%20NW/128/128/37
4 PM New York Time

Web
http://www.alansondheim.org
http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
__________________________________________



Debris Field is composed of all the objects I have worked with for the
past eight months in Odyssey; it's an archaeology of one site by another -
an archaeology that constructs something new out of the ruins.

It's not ruins: It's compressed history. It's a history of compression, of
textures, of objects, of mistakes, of failures, of errors, of misery, of
language/sex/body, of avatar sheave-skin. It what happens when an
insomniac gets hold of a virtual world.

Performance with Sandy Baldwin at opening
Song and sound by Azure Carter

Architecture for a new year:

  - shapes matter less than the comfort that coheres within them.
  - outside assume vagaries and opposition.
  - architectures as transitional objects.
  - living within the teddy-bear.
  - in the Second Life installation: dynamic micro-architectures of
- deconstruction and enclosure.
- no entrances, no exits: one appears, disappears.
- what constitutes coming and going are virtual particles = people.
  - virtual to the extent that one passes through doors and walls:
one passes through flats, nodes, and textures. nothing is comfortable
when the transitional turns on you.
- Second Life = transitional object = preparation for virtual life.
- real life = virtual life; body = inscription; wryting = body;
  - uncanny = inscription; world = word; word = idiotic.
  - micro-architectures of the visible: setting up the camera image
     just so: harboring time of day, weather, height, distance from
     avatar or avatar viewpoint, location beneath the ground or water
     surface or clothing, location in collusion with sheave-skin,
      moment of capture = arrangement of objects in flight.
- micro-architectures within objects in flight: buildings escaped
   from occupants, homes escaped from families, dwellings escaped
   from inhabitants, bodies escaped from inscription.
- bodies escaped from inscription: debris of the body, abjection.
- abjection in micro-architecture: no place to sit, no place to lie: an
avatar never lies. no place to sleep: an avatar never sleeps; no
place to declare:  an avatar tells the truth.
- coordinates, program, language, protocol, code, alphanumerics,
binary oppositions: the truth of anything unforsaken in the saying of it.
- micro-architectures: between code and architecture.

For Arena installation in Second Life:

1. Dropping those objects which have been taken - piled, flight: every-
thing flees, there's always clear space.
2. Physical objects:  non-phantom, but dropped, held in position, but
whatever for?
3.  Something tawdry, indigestible.
4. Flight to such a degree that they soon tunnel out of site (for most
settings), head out of world - the site has to be _tended,_ constantly
refurbished. Tended = a tendency to _disappear._
5. To work on _inpenetrable_ sound.
6. To work on transparent non-phantom objects: another position.
7. Intensities as things meld into one another - in the form of a debris
field.
8. Debris field = Gaza-slaughter. (title?)
9. Particulation of objects.
10. Object rings with internal physical objects can't get out.
11. None of the above.
12. Try and reach 4098m with pile. (Got to 2327.)



How to view here and in the Odyssey show

suggestions -

1. Try turning the glow off. Go to preferences, graphics, and uncheck
basic shading, if it's on. Basic shading seems to use up more resources
than anything else with the rendering engine. You can also set things
like rendering distance; the lower the distance, the faster the loading.

2. Turn the video media button off. This on the lower right-hand corner
of the screen. If you turn it on, the texture-mapping consumes a huge
amount of resources. On the other hand, the audio for the parcel (the
audio button) runs fairly lean.

3. If you find the space too cluttered to enter, try flying in.

  4. If you find flying in too cluttered, fly higher, and drop in. There is
  a dome in the center of the space which you can enter.

5. Most objects on the ground level (and some beneath the ground, on the
seafloor) will flee from you - what looks crowded from a distance might
well clear out.

6. If it clears out, look up - you'll see all sorts of things above you.

7. Fly vertically to see the rest of the exhibition. If you can't fly as
high as you want, click control-alt-d, which opens up an advanced menu.
Open the menu and get rid of camera constraints. You can then move the
camera at a great distance from your avatar body - your viewpoint moves
  independently, and you can move at least to the top of the exhibition,
which is maybe a mile or so up, SL measurement.

  8. If you get stuck anywhere, teleport back in.

9. Try moving inside the objects; the interior textures are often
different from the exterior ones (this is almost always the case with the
spheres).

10. You can push objects vertically into the sky by moving beneath them
and flying; they flee upwards.

11. You can see the exhibition 'differently' by using the advanced menu,
going to render, and then looking for info - clicking on any one of the
info options will give you different viewpoints.

  12. You can often sit on moving objects, which will whirl you around; if
  you sit on an object that moves vertically as a result of your proximity,
you can ride it up. When you stand up again, you can fall down back into
the space. The riding height seems to be around 4098 SL units, but unless
you have a flight bracelet or feather, you probably won't go that high.
(Gaz can go anywhere.)

13. Moving about on the ground level, keep the sound turned on (lower
right), and you'll hear a variety of songs about SL and language. These
mix with a number of looping sound modules embedded in the space.

14. Go to
  http://www.kippiefriedkin.com/resources/secondlife-viewer-cheatsheet.pdf
for shortcuts for all sorts of rendering possibilities; most
of these are also available in the menu or advanced menu.

15. If you've been moving around SL a lot, go to preferences, and empty
your cache; this might speed things up. You'll have to restart SL again.

  16. If you see a sign for teleporting, try it. Sometimes it will lead
back to the ground level, sometimes to the seabed, sometimes to a
skysphere. All of these locations have clickable objects which will take
you else- where (or back to the same space but at a slightly different
location). You might have to right-click on the object, then click on
teleport - or you might just left click - it depends on the object.

17, Try different 'lenses' - click on control-8 to make the image wide-
angle, control-9 to return to normal, control-0 for telephoto. Repeated
clicks work as well - with control-8 you can create extreme distortions.

18, Try moving into 'small' spaces and look about. You can save snapshots
of anything you see, on your hard drive.

19. That's about it. The general idea is to run lean, fly about, teleport
back if you're stuck, play with the controls. The architecture is
constantly changing and deconstructing itself – play.
original exhibition

  http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22