Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0910011223220.20934@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: text for performance tonight (with Sandy Baldwin)
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 12:23:32 -0400 (EDT)
========================================================================= "The performance aspects I work with are based on the notion of absolute spectacle; what is presented is literally all there is. An avatar has no meat, cannot be wounded, hungry, thirsty, dead. An avatar can embody hysteria, convulsions, autonomic dance. We demonstrate this dance-body movement in combination with a text I will present at the time through chat." - ========================================================================= Performance, followed by discussion, will begin at 10pm New York time (12pm Melbourne time) and will last until 10.45pm New York tome (12.45pm Melbourne time). grappling with the question of time - still contraditory "number of motion in respect of before and after? Irrecuperable diachrony of pure passingness? Reversible? Relative? Real? Living Present? Original transcendence? Structure of consciousness? experiences, memories, dreams, imaginings, and dwellings: time as absolute/static: nothing happens what happens is the time of the body, which happens to the view, not the viewed. the speed-up is something the operator doesn't have to inhabit. the operator knows what is happening = the operator can trace what is happening definitely dreamlike, but ruptured dream, lucid dream the nightmare of falling off the platform, falling out of the game space my work is always in a hurry, i always feel near death, so my art is really nothing but a series of small completions every completion, every gesture, leads somewhere else. i'm bound by what's possible for me in Second Life, whch is bound by money on my part - not enough to rent a decent space, not enough to purchase proper computers. as an independent i work outside of academia; whatever i do is largely by myself and my limited resources. nothing will remain of it, of this control, after my death. and these, these are already altered and frozen gestures, from the movement- moment of bodies a long time ago, bodies whose names are forgotten, who no longer have, no longer take up, residence, here or there i relate to the phantasm, uncanny, an imaginary, to the hypnagogic, to theory which turns its back on me, to an exclusionary economics which keeps me here, not with you, not there in Oz. i can only dream Oz, or dream Oz dreaming, perhaps you are not there, you are not there, at all in time, there will be no avatars. in time. in close time, there is no hunger, no pain, no damage, no tears, no illness, no injury, no thirst. close time is closed time; the avatar inhabits an event horizon, a gathering of information without interior - with at best, the simulacrum of interior isn't death, where there is no death, where there is nothing? isn't death the escapement of its absence, permeating an inconsiderate memory of being? death presupposes an event, cracks and stutters time. death vectorizes time, and without death, i imagine everything reversible, neither here nor there. the deathless is indescribable, a true-real death neither of nor within-without the world. it always takes time to die.