Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1207110207320.6411@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Guide to the digital archive - Sondheim
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2012 02:12:33 -0400 (EDT)
(I prepared this for a digital archive of my work at Cornell University; it might be of interest since it gives a reasonable overview of my work. I had a great deal of difficulty trying to make 'sense' of what I do - there are gaps and omissions, for which I beg forgiveness, but the basic structure is present. Thanks for looking. Hopefully this description will be accepted and functional at Cornell; I need to continue my life in quiet and mostly hidden ways. - Alan.) ALAN SONDHEIM: DIGITAL WORK ARCHIVE ORIGINAL AND ADDITIONAL ARCHIVE Guide to the Digital Archive (prepared for Cornell University) The LaCie Setup directory should be ignored. The TEXTINDEX directory is used for searching for particular files. The search syntax is accessed by the AstroGrep.exe application, which is more or less self-explanatory. If you want to find a description for ennui.mov, for example, you would search in TEXTINDEX\ for "ennui.mov"; you would then use a standard Windows or Mac application like Notepad to search within the particular file. Not all files are indexed, but many are. Note that AstroGrep behaves pretty much like the grep command in unix; there are other Windows- or Mac- based programs that will do the same. This program is one of the best ways to 'feel' the organization of the directories on the hard drives. However, nothing is perfect, and unfortunately there are orphaned files as well; if there is one that you need information about, please contact me (contact information below), give me the name, date, and directory of the file, and I'll do my best to help you. There are two top-level directories - one for this hard drive, and one for the earlier. The difference between them is only the date - so that the later 3DAR is 3DAR2 for example. Here's a rough breakdown of the contents, in the order below: 3DAR - 3D imagery, video, raw files, and Augmented Reality files, including animated gifs, as well as video and images. 5-11ONLINE-SNAP is a snapshot of my online alansondheim.org contents as of May, 2011. ALPINE contains most of the work done by the dancer/choreographer/ performer Foofwa d'Imobilite, with Azure Carter, myself, and dancer Maud Liardon; it was shot in the Aletsch area of the Swiss Alps, as well as in Geneva and Pringy. AUDIO contains all of the sound files, including the music files I've made performering solo or with other musicians. There is also an online archive at http://espdisk.com/alansondheim which is also accessible through http://lounge.espdisk.com/ The files include other soundwork, using shortwave or crystal or very low frequency radios, as well as a vibration meter for detecting sub-audible vibrations in buildings. AZIMAGE contains numerous images by, or related to, my partner and collaborator Azure Carter. BACKGROUNDS includes mainly 'background' material, used in all sorts of productions, ranging from Second Life performances and architecture (often involving strange texture-mapping), to 'inspirational' material for cultural work. COURSES includes the materials I've used in course-work, teaching at a number of institutions, from Brown University through the New School, Florida International University, and School of Visual Arts, among others. FLOPPY includes work on older floppy disks. FOOFWA includes the heart of the collaborations with Foofwa d'Imobilite, Azure Carter, and myself; these include video, still, and audio pieces, as well as dance performances in Switzerland, New York, Rhode Island, and elsewhere. A great deal of the work has been shown across Europe and the United States. GEOGRAPHIC is a very large category that includes images I took in resonances with places, ranging from the Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island, to the Everglades, Hunting Beach in California, Aurora and Denver in Colorado, Switzerland, Canada, and trips across the United States (often involved with locating 'quiet zones' for very low frequency radio recording), and so forth. These images are shown by themselves, used for texture-mapping and inspiration, used for study- ing landforms and wilderness, and so forth. HTML are small pieces written in early html, sometimes using Visual Basic as well; they're interactive for the most part and self- explanatory. MOCAP began with the Virtual Environments Laboratory at West Virginia University, through Frances van Scoy and Sandy Baldwin, and includes a vast array of experimental work done with motion capture equipment; the software interface was rewritten for this. I late worked at Columbia College in Chicago, extended my mocap experimentation with dancers; this was through Patrick Lichty. The resulting files were used for creating and studying 'alien' behavior, using Poser mannequins, abstract avatars created through Blender, and abstracted/bizarre avatars in the virtual world Second Life. OLDERSAMPLER is related to SAMPLER2 in the second hard-drive; both present earlier work that was formally presented on DVDs at the time. They were meant to be self-contained. PARAB was a collaboration made largely at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, among Foofwa, Azure, and myself; its back- bone is a text I wrote, The Parables of Nikuko, which was published as a chapbook by Peter Ganick's Potes and Poets Press. I was influenced by early Japanese literature, particularly the Kojiki, which forms the mythological background. At this time, and shortly after, I was making a number of cd-roms, each more or less themed; these later expanded to DVDs, and now, sets of DVDs - for example, we've been working on a set of the Alpine pieces described above. PDF includes a fairly large library of PDF files I've collected over the years and used for my own theoretical and cultural work. PERFORMANCE includes materials related to the large number of perfor- mances I've been involved in, including mixed-reality, Second Life, dance and choreography, music and sound, reading, and laptop. As with many of the categories in the Archive, PERFORMANCE blurs into ALPINE and PARAB, as well as FOOFWA, SEXUALITY, and SL. For this reason, there is some repetition of files, but in the long run, I decided this wasn't a problem if pieces were multiply-accessed. PERSONAL is a complex category, and includes images and videos, etc. that generally wouldn't be exhibited as such. They include materials related to the death of my parents, personal memorials and celebrations, and so forth. They include a lot of material on my background as well, including images that might have gone into GEOGRAPHIC for example. These works might not be indexed through the search function. PUBLICATION relates to materials that have been, or might be, published - works that have been 'prepared' for publication, for better or worse. I should mention that a fair amount of the Internet Text (see TEXTS) has come out in magazine, zine, online magazine, chapbook, online publish-on-demand book, or standard book, form; for me, this involves a regathering/re-editing of materials for that purpose. The works break down into several categories, ranging from theory, to phenomenology of the virtual, analog and digital phenomenologies, philosophies of electronic literatures, experimental writings and plays, and so forth. Again, the categories are sloppy. There is one restricted directory which should only be viewed with care: SEXUALITY: Work that contains explicit images or nudity; this should only be seem and accessed in-house. No files from this directory should be duplicated. The directory includes a great deal of work created at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY; much of this was created with Vea Lucca and Foofwa d'Imobilite, over a number of years. This directory includes all nude images, whether sexual or not. There are a number of dance and other performance works here, including Trilby, which was shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival; and Evam and Crepuscule, which have been shown at a number of venues in Europe. SL is a large directory, containing all the work pursuant to my pieces in Second Life. The pieces fall into three blurred categories: working with modified avatars and 'distorted' avatar behaviors (see MOCAP for their original, as we as 3DAR); architectures and architectural struc- tures which involve 'alien' phenomenologies and modes of avatar move- ment involving constant negotation of the spaces; and performances, often with Sandy Baldwin or Foofwa d'Imobilite, using all of these elements together, in combination with textual work (related directly to experimental electronic literature), and mixed reality technologies. Much of my focus has been here, dealing with issues of language, death, sexuality, pain, and 'wounding' in the virtual, and their relation to the viewing or participating subject. Much of this work was the focus of my Eyebeam Art + Technology Center residency in New York this past year, from September 2011 to March 2012. STILLS are just that - still images that are stand-alone pieces, or sequences, that I didn't feel fell into any other category. TALKSETC are notes in relation to seminars, conferences, or talks - it's a somewhat miscellaneous category. TEXTS is a main category; these are, for the most part, sections of the Internet Text, a continuous meditation on the virtual and the real, which I have been engaged in since 1994. The texts also contain descriptions of the media files for the most part; the two are often interrelated. In the Archive 2 hard drive, the TEXTINDEX directory can be searched, as indicated above, with AstroGrep; TEXTS2 contains some additional texts, but these are addenda. In the first hard drive, from August 3, 2011, below, the full TEXTS directory can be searched. Please note there may well be subdirectories with personal textual material that should not be quoted without permission. I wanted to make all of this as open and useful as possible - hence, the inclusions. But I do insist on discretion here. TEXTS and TEXTS2 also include separate articles and other materials that weren't in the Internet Text, or are in it as separate essays/pieces/experiments. For example, there is cstalk.rtf in TEXTS2, that constitutes a talk I gave at a computer science department (I forget where), and the aden.rtf is a series of notes on talks I gave last year through the invitation of Aden Evans, to speak at Dartmouth. There are also 'reasembled compilations,' such as the distillation text that brings together a number of works on pain - I've used it in various presentations, including one at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference this year in Morgantown, West Virginia. TRACE contains the files created when I was the second Virtual-Writer- in-Residence for the trAce (sic) online writing community, headed by Sue Thomas, and originating at Nottingham-Trent University. I held the position over the millennium 'hinge' and worked on a number of projects, ranging from writing into and around 'student' production, to creating two open pieces - a novel anyone could write into (I designed five 'strands' for this, and the result was multi-media), as well as a piece called 'Lost' - in which participants listed things or people they had lost; a long list appeared, separating the things or people from the participants' names. Both were highly successful. I also organized a Traceroute Piece, with world-wide participation - people did traceroutes of Internet connectivity over the 1999-2000 interval, when the Net was considered vulnerable (nothing really happened). The huge traceroute files documented the connectivity and speed of router connections at the time. Finally, VIDEO is just that - video pieces that don't fit into any of the other categories, Some of these are in series; some of them are stand-alone. As the years went by, the resolution gets better and better, but some of the earliest works are some of the best. In Archive2, there are two additional directories: ELOCONF contains a number of files related to the ELO Conf. described above. The panel I was Maria Damon, Sandy Baldwin, and myself, and dealt with the issues of pain etc. mentioned in the SL description (also above). The visuals include a set of hand-modified .obj files for 3D modeling that 'encapsulate' and distort mannequin figures. EYEBEAM contains a huge number of files related to the research done during the September-March residency (see SL above). These include a performance with Monika Weiss, and performances with Foofwa, Azure, and Chris Diasparra (on baritone or tenor sax). The Foofwa performan- ces extended over a week, with a final 'complete' performance on Saturday; during the week, we made a number of mixed-reality work using a Bambuser video account, Second Life, live dance and sound, and a stage/staging area where everything came together. Earlier on, I did something similar during the Open Studio period. The files are extensive. There were also a number of 3-d printed objects - mostly distorted avatars - made during the residency; there are images of these - as well as a series of texts. I did a blog through the six months which may be found at http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim . The blog as a whole gives a good indication of my working methods, and lists a number of pieces present on the hard drive. Please note that some of the links had to be broken, since my online webpage is commercial, and I have to keep limiting the size. Two other things - when you explore the directories on both of the hard drives, you'll find a fair number of video DVD files, including one made with Kathy Acker, another dealing with Ciudad Juarez and so forth. These are fairly self-explanatory, and with a little coaxing, should run fine. You might have to download them onto a DVD disk or computer, however. Contact information: Alan Sondheim, 432 Dean Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11217. Email: sondheim@panix.com , sondheim@gmail.com . Best write to both. Phone: 347-383-8552 or 718-813-3285 (secondary). Webpage: http://www.alansondheim.org (a directory) ESP directory: http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ ESP lounge: http://lounge.espdisk.com/ Blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ Second blog at http://avatarpaste.blogspot.com/ Blog used for Underacademy Course on Anorectic Avatars: http://anorecticavatar.blogspot.com/ Facebook: Alan Sondheim Skype: asondheim Underacademy college: http://underacademycollege.wordpress.com/ Email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ ORIGINAL ARCHIVE: The following directories were assembled by August 3, 2011: Total: 3 247 435 776(3096M) Free: 4 188 737 536(3994M) Dirs Files Usage(b) Directory: -------------------------------------------------------------- 31 3874 44 714 283 008 3DAR 14 3279 10 730 618 880 5-11ONLINE-SNAP 15 1392 128 243 580 928 ALPINE 165 4032 132 703 813 632 AUDIO 33 3388 11 975 135 232 AZIMAGE 33 1503 5 596 209 152 BACKGROUNDS 630 9868 1 482 756 096 COURSES 156 3113 108 081 152 FLOPPY 112 3466 174 080 950 272 FOOFWA 15 11890 68 579 143 680 GEOGRAPHIC 12 325 10 063 872 HTML 55 3716 99 285 327 872 MOCAP 35 916 40 772 509 696 OLDERSAMPLER 1 52 1 190 060 032 PARAB 370 8982 9 905 655 808 PDF 169 2704 131 841 875 968 PERFORMANCE 27 3345 38 352 998 400 PERSONAL 14 334 194 969 600 PUBLICATION 127 2513 104 527 392 768 SEXUALITY 18 5606 105 480 122 368 SL 5 1218 387 674 112 STILLS 9 702 14 030 970 880 TALKSETC 91 4328 446 529 536 TEXTS 3 111 4 673 536 TRACE 32 2295 308 243 775 488 VIDEO -------------------------------------------------------------- Again, please note: The archive is organized into twenty-five directories. There is some duplication, and there are files that are difficult to place; for example a dance performance might also reveal something about a landscape - it might be placed, therefore, in FOOFWA, GEOGRAPHIC, or PERFORMANCE. Azure's work may be accessed through http://azurecarter.weebly.com SECOND AND ADDITIONAL ARCHIVE: The following additions were made by July 10, 2012: Volume in drive G is Archive2 Volume Serial Number is D2E6-15F2 Directory of G:\ 07/10/2012 04:08 AM <DIR> 3DAR2 07/10/2012 02:06 PM 241,664 AstroGrep.exe 07/10/2012 02:06 PM 196 AstroGrep.exe.config 07/10/2012 02:06 PM 401 AstroGrep_v4.2.3_changelog.txt 07/10/2012 04:10 AM <DIR> AUDIO2 07/10/2012 02:56 AM <DIR> ELOCONF 07/10/2012 04:17 AM <DIR> EYEBEAM 07/10/2012 02:27 AM <DIR> FOOFWA2 07/10/2012 04:10 AM <DIR> GEOGRAPHIC2 07/10/2012 02:16 PM howtouse.txt 07/09/2012 08:14 PM <DIR> LaCie Setup 07/10/2012 02:06 PM 18,432 libAstroGrep.dll 07/10/2012 04:07 AM <DIR> MOCAP2 07/10/2012 04:10 AM <DIR> PERFORMANCE2 07/10/2012 04:12 AM <DIR> PERSONAL2 07/10/2012 03:49 AM <DIR> SAMPLER2 07/10/2012 04:02 AM <DIR> SL2 07/10/2012 04:07 AM <DIR> STILLS2 07/10/2012 01:41 PM <DIR> TEXTINDEX 07/10/2012 04:25 AM <DIR> TEXTS2 07/10/2012 04:01 AM <DIR> VIDEO2 5 File(s) 260,693 bytes 16 Dir(s) 1,634,208,178,176 bytes free The dll, .config, changelog.txt, and AstroGrep.exe are all necessary for seaching, as described above. These files should be copied into the first external hard drive as well, accomapnied by this howtouse.txt file. Note: Please get in touch if you have any questions about privacy, use, and so forth. Also please note there is a biog.txt in TEXTS2 at least that gives some biographical information. =======================================================================