Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0901291116070.14119@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: The Newborn Age
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:16:21 -0500 (EST)
The Newborn Age http://www.alansondheim.org/back1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/back2.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/back3.png http://www.alansondheim.org/back4.png http://www.alansondheim.org/back5.png http://www.alansondheim.org/back7.png another masque for Alan Dojoji aka Aylan Dojoji aka Julu Twine; hir body switched back to female (during performance), hir prosthesis switched back to male. It's an uncomfortable image; a close friend in Brooklyn has cancer now and this figure (in the sense of trope) appears to carry, not sexuality, but death upon hir. It must be seen that the entire avatar is prosthetic, that it breaks down into prosthetic and malleable parts, that many of the parts are detachable, and in fact, that many of the parts are detached. I do not dream of hir but dream through hir; as transitional object, s/he returns the repressed into furious transformations of the landscape - furious in the sense of quickly thrown up, in spite of their complexity. You go in now and it's different than yesterday, you go in tomorrow and it's different than today. As fetish-object, avatar and hir space. S/he wears the space like s/pace, like cloth, action-cloth, flex- bile prims (object-units). S/he's about the only identifiable element in place. Literally s/he channels the show, pointing towards a place in s/pace or thing - then adding, subtracting, distending, wryting, wrything, among new or old objects until everything appears to gleam again or respond in sullen misery. Kristevan semiology, grammar of tropes and tropic grammar, s/he moves among the concretization of theory, stopping here for a moment for a slim series of portrait-images on the ground, beneath the surface of the sea, in the sky - in Second Life, it makes no difference. S/he is always already newborn, refreshed at 60 hz, redrawn by a distant machinic tended by sysadmins who never came close to hir image, hir presence or coordinates, hir history, what s/he has accomplished as if by hirself in an untoward or contrary manner. Meanwhile closer to earth, Linux Journal has an article on SL and open source, really elementary, but next issue promises more. I bring this up only because of its description of SL art, which is similar to other descriptions, and almost always refers to the surrealist/dadaist juxta- position of objects and movements, bordering on fantasies. What about this? Only that artists who are doing truly original work in SL - Gaz for example - are ignored, while art seems to have shifted into fairy-tales. I would love to see something in the more or less popular press about the radical _alterity_ of Second Life - the ability to create ab nihilo so to speak, not even from the ground up. The epistemology of the world itself can be questioned, as well as s/paces and places almost inconceivable, even as dreamwork, elsewhere. Enough with wings and sparkles!
