The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

The apocalypse will ever be witnessed:
The chora of repetitive compression

Or why we must become space and time, or why the surge is
absent.

http://www.alansondheim.org/newsm06.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/newsm.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/newsm.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/newsm10.jpg

At the very end, neutrinos continue their oscillation, virtual
particles remain beneath the level of a universe without
memories, the catastrophic mix and visibility of stabilized
plateaus has disappeared, witnesses no longer call witnesses,
one might argue for darkness, but doesn't that imply logic,
light, that eye which is no longer presenting? Identity in the
meantime, earlier regimes, lies in the fabrication of memory;
each turn of the wheel is an event; each slide and lubrication
creates an ineffable signature. Here we are in the construction
potential of the apocalypse; the surge guarantees the absence of
a return, and in this manner, what we're witnessing in the
images and sound is a nostalgia and its denouement - the
exhaustion of energy and bodies, the horizon of extinctions
which continues to roll and boil over us.

The video is on the order of an essay on mechanism harboring oil
and steam; the audio is the foregrounding of arenas and sound.
Everything is already a century old; the world wears itself
down, taking us along with it. It's not technological advance or
determinism, but rust, corrosion, decay, fatigue, particle
physics, radiations, dusts, entropy, that are fundamental, no
matter what the tending or stewardship, no matter the redundancy
of big data, databanks, seed-vaults or bunkers. It goes in the
end; this is imminent, immanent, and obvious to all. I think it
might be repetition all the way down, but asymptotic in its own
way, quietude emerging somewhere around planck. Or not quietude,
but roiling, which results in the motto: The apocalypse will
never be witnessed. And so it goes, and will already have been
gone.