Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0911231406540.29117@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Passive-Aggressively Blowing My Own Horn
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:08:50 -0500 (EST)
Passive-Aggressively Blowing My Own Horn =================== Early on, around 1994-5, I developed the concept of 'rewrite,' the enunci- ation/announcement of online presence - an ontological performative funda- mentally changing the way humans communicate. I developed the concept of 'defuge' to indicate a kind of disinvestment or staleness that psychologically characterizes aspects of online and offline life. I worked through the 'inscribed body'/'body of inscription' in relation to 'culture all the way down,' placing the semiotic register across all species, and this in relation to an examination of the phenomenology of culture itself. I worked extensively with the idea of 'third sex,' produced solely through the dynamics of a linguistic register in various social applications; in this respect, I further developed the concept of lag as seductive lure. I did early work on MOOs and talkers, creating what would later be called codework pieces, by manipulating the database labels of both; I also worked on a phenomenology of talk/chat applications, ranging from MOOs to IRC. I created a number of codework pieces, interfering in IRC channels, rewriting talker and MOO databases, and so forth. I created the word 'codework' to reference a style of writing in which code-bones are apparent, scrabbling the surface and depths of texts, and in this regard was a forerunning of flarf, early on google-scraping and working with perl programs and unix/linux scripts to reconstitute texts, drawing new extended meanings out of them. With the help of Florian Cramer, I extended the structure of the Chinese Thousand-Character Essay into other texts, using a perl program that kept only the first instance of a word, in its proper order; I operated upon Genesis in this fashion. I have worked with one of the longest-running art projects online - the Internet Text, which I add to daily, and which was started at the begin- ning of 1994. In Second Life, I have constructed a new and extreme style of artwork, in which real-life textures are combined with 'alien' shapes and spaces, having no basis in the real world. With Foofwa de Imobilite and Azure Carter - we have pioneered a form of dancework called 'avadance' from avatar movement, and this movement itself has been pioneering, using software- and hardware-altered motion capture equipment to create 'inconceivable' mappings of human behaviors. Through Gary Manes, I pioneered in the creation of dynamic filters for motion capture processing; these parallel graphic filters in image-proc- essing programs, but they transform both time- and space-coordinates. Using Blender, I have created avatars without any human or organic feat- ures whatsoever, adding human behavioral patterns to them, in order to examine the phenomenology of behavioral 'reading' without cues from a body image itself. In music, I have pioneered new guitar techniques, as well as extended the possibilities of instruments such as Alpine zither, hegelung, and cobza. I have written one of the first extended works dealing with body abjection and discomfort, centered on cancer, through the use of codework and other textual manipulations. Early on, I created a series of raw texts from net-sex - texts which led to the concept of 'wryting,' inscribing the body itself as projection and introjection; this led to the concept of 'jectivity,' indicating the psychological and psychoanalytical flows between agents, screens, desire, and programs. Along the same line, in an extended text called Textbook of Thinking, I created a 'ruptured' analysis of the obscene and the abject as existing in a different register, within or beneath the linguistic - this deeper register (related to Kristeva's 'chora') underlies human communication and behavior. Early on, I wrote on textual interfaces in linux, and their phenomenolo- gies; I also analyzed talk and ytalk in linux/unix as representations of the body on-screen, in terms of screen 'real estate.' Through textual avatars such as Nikuko, Travis, Alan, Jennifer, and Julu, I worked through psychological and psychoanalytical issues of projected identities; these characters appeared anywhere from talkers to IRC to email to newsgroups to Second Life. In terms of philosophical issues, I wrote extensively on the relationship of the 'analogic' and 'digital' registers, using the abacus as a starting point; this also has led to a series of purely philosophical texts, such as Sophia and Philosophy, which utilize conceptual organization as a way to structure analyses of the real. I have written as well on the fundamental entanglement of the real and virtual, within the phenomenology of inscription - an entanglement that virtualizes and mirrors any ontology, within any other. I have written what might be the deepest analysis of Second Life from within - that is, an analysis of virtual worlds and worlding, in a series of texts gathered in The Accidental Artist. In dance, I have created a series of 'possibilities' using VLF (very low frequency radio) in order to create a dialectic between choreography/ movement and the 'invisible' radiating world at large. (I should mention my early video- and film-work, based on new techniques - for example, in the early 1980s, I created a 16mm (sound) film a week, using multiple in-camera processing, layering optical soundtracks on the fly, and so forth.) Within the sociology of postmodernism, I have analyzed the social in terms of radiations and dusts, using these to model transmission (both basic and parasitic) and reception across a variety of spectra. Along the same lines, I have written on the phenomenology of VLF, short- wave listening, and similar things which emphasize hunting virtualities in worldings that are always already continuously evanescent and vanishing. Early on, I created artworks using Quickbasic and Basic, to create images that scattered from within, as well as fractal traces using a phenomenolo- gy of measurement - these led to considering the boundaries of the visual in relation to the boundaries of the world, which was also built upon a re-examination of inscribing between x and -x in set theories. Earlier still, I created pieces that involved 'driving in 4-space' - moving through four-dimensional space - the image was flattened to a 2-space vector screen. And slightly later, using UCSD Pascal, I created 'active-editing' programs that would take textual input and transform it on the fly; this led to an analysis of parasitism and noise in situations where it seemed imperative to transmit a message through a hostile environment. These same techniques were used, within the past few years, as a way to interfere with three-dimensional modeling programs, so that it became almost, but not totally, impossible to reconstitute the original image from the scan - and this led, in turn, to reworking avatar bodies them- selves in second life, producing anomalous and unreadable structures motivated by avatar 'intelligence' within them. And so forth. =================== So where is this work? Scattered among chapbooks, print-on-demand books (which are never available for review or perusal), within the Internet Text and at the website I use to temporarily store files (temporarily - given the limited storage I have). There are archived materials at the Ohio State University in Columbus; there are materials that will be archived at New York University in Manhattan. There are over twenty-five hours of films still at Filmmakers Coop, where they sit and decay. There are several cds, and three non-publish-on-demand books, none of which discuss any of the above. There have been a number of manuscripts which continue to gather dust. At one point I self-published several dvds and texts, but that proved impractical. What happened? My work is difficult to grasp; it moves too quickly among disciplines and (artistic) communities; almost all of it is non-academic in style; it's unsellable; it's parasitic on email lists, and appears (as this text appears) only as noise; it's sent to /dev/null one way or ano- ther; at times it appears too neurotic, sexual, intense, moribund, diffi- cult, or depressive; it takes far too much time to read and/or process; it seems to short-circuit itself; I'm socially awkward, etc. etc. What will happen? Surely nothing until after my death, and then, if the works survive on someone's machine, something might come of them; however by then, they'll most likely be outdated. This can only end on an "ah, well...". ===================