Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.11.1502182245150.21388@panix5.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Carrying
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2015 22:49:53 -0500 (EST)
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.