The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

February 18, 2015


fast big storm speed for jeremy hight

http://www.alansondheim.org/amtrak06.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/bigstorm.mp4

the doors of the train were froze shut and the engine
stopped working and had to have a new engine brought
to us and the doors were sounds made from shovels and
other stuff freeing some of them and i shoot from the
window of the person in front of me but guess what, i
worked hard on the editing and parameters of each
segment, it might not show it but it's exactly like
that, that makes it seem that there's no editing or
parameter setting but just raw footage designed to
look like it was worked intensely into this piece, of
course this has been done repeatedly but then all of
them are different and still magical, i.e. wonder

Carrying

http://www.alansondheim.org/nyumocap46.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/carrying.mp4

// first in a series

thanks to Mark Swarek, who organized, produced,
documented, and participated in this event;
thanks to Javier Molina, who ran the mocap;
thanks to performers Kenny Tan and Joseph Xin;
thanks to Azure Carter, who documented and
participated in this event, produced at NYU's
motion capture studio in Brooklyn.

The software uses position markers which continue to track
an avatar; no matter how convoluted the double bodies are,
the points represent the marker coordinates. The mannequin
becomes/is an emanation or emanent, no longer connected to
the points, but carried or abandoned by them. The avatar
in other words repeatedly casts off shells, alternative
histories, as the performers move. The histories are
trajectories which may be traced; the mannequin is the
remains of an uncanny presence. I think to myself, this is
the history of the world. The two performers motivated one
avatar; the avatar is a social construct, lifeless on its
own, living within the obdurate/inert. Ghosts carry ghosts.
This is a procedural semiotics simultaneously embodying
creation and annihilation, lassitude and the pointillist
presence of action. I think to myself, holographic universe
or a convolution yet unnamed, always already present,
always an actant, even in the 0-point stasis of death or
the uniformity of existence burying all metaphors; what
does or doesn't move, what signs or disappears, is moot.

Generated by Mnemosyne 0.12.