Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.20.1703261636100.12736@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Arctic Examples
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2017 16:39:13 -0400 (EDT)
Arctic Examples http://www.alansondheim.org/0two.png For example http://www.alansondheim.org/iceberg.png - created and posted yesterday. This is an example of an indexical process; engravings of icebergs were loaded in Google image and the screenshot was downloaded. The borders were changed to black in Photoshop through a fill function; the function was used repeatedly to erode the edges of the iceberg images, paralleling the erosion of icebergs in the arctic regions. The resulting image was tinged blue, a blue-twilight ice related to nineteenth-century exploration and the twilight existence of the regions today. Just as the arctic wilderness is being attacked and transformed, our civil liberties and the security of immigrants are also under attack, communities of all sorts feeling the imminence of violation and violence. For example http://www.alansondheim.org/iceberg.mp4 - the accompanying video, black-and-white representation of an unknown and inhospitable region, with what might be auroras and the results of snowblindness. The arctic is mostly dry with high winds and blizzard-like conditions; explorers wrote constantly about disorientation. The video was produced in Second Life, using the emission-point of particle generation in combination with the iceberg.png image used as an object texture. The platform ground had to be eliminated, along with any images of other familiar objects. This is resonant with my interest in alien, contrary or untoward landscapes, which are almost impossible to negotiate - the opposite of gamification, for example, in which lures, clues, cliffhangers, and narrative come to mind. The traditional narrative in the arctic proceeds, at the limit as if it were ab nihilo, its own bootstrapped origin. And it may go nowhere at all; it may circle around the same camp until exhaustion sets in; it may disappear into itself. So many expeditions were documenting their own demise - that delay I spoke of, the records found perhaps decades later. I've never been to the arctic; I've traveled a bit north in Quebec and around Nova Scotia, but these are more or less temperate in comparison. But Robin Collyer and I planned an expedition to Lake Hazen, Baffin Island, in the 1970s; we wanted to be dropped off on the shore, to document, do projects, and so forth; I was interested in the phenomenology of the region, which at least then was uninhabited. We found that the cost of the trip would be around $25,000, and we had nothing like that amount; I was also at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design at that point, and my stay was coming to an end. So the project feel through. We met with a number of people, however, and I learned a great deal; there was excellent Canadian satellite imagery of the region. Later, I was on a miserably aborted hiring in Tasmania, somewhat close to Antarctic, and I started to make inquiries about traveling there through Australia. I didn't want to go in the summer, but the winter; I wanted to comprehend the violence of deep incapacity. Again, there wasn't time. In the 1990s, I was on Cu-SeeMe a lot, an early video chat; the most notable experience was contacting researchers in Antarctica, and that formed a _punctum_ for me, that the net researched there as well, that one unknown was being quickly eroded (the structure of mapping and exploration) for another (the problematic of an increasingly totalized globe (not planet). (So then recently, I found a cache of books at the Providence Public Library, almost all first- and second-hand accounts of Arctic and Antarctic exploration published from 1820-1910, which have been invaluable; I've written about the far north, for example, in terms of blankspace, and these books have their maps intact. (The books were free, and that's another complicated story.) So not only can the formal boundaries of geographic knowledge be traced through them - but also the habitus of exploration, so to speak - the erosion of the symbolic and indexical, the preponderance of the imaginary and brute force of the ikonic, and so forth.) All of this has gone into that other text, part theory, part codework, and into the back-story of the image/film. And then there are these words: carved: wind and water carving ice-floe, iceberg, shore; caved: caving of the iceberg, erosion of the flow; calved: calving of icebergs, stranding of expeditions; craved: polar transforming and transformative desires; - beneath the signs of the poles; within an oddly-ruptured and perhaps impassable landscape; whiteout without the signs of poles and landscape; the journal and the book, the apparatus of signification; the originary silence and inconceivable movement in the history of writing; and the creation of _these_ images, _these_ texts, as if there were a contribution to a form of knowledge among them. (I've been thinking of manque, and its relation to the arctic, and to my own failure - to travel to one or another region, to write or think these regions (or to even write or think the writing-from-a-distance of these regions), or to write in fact anything (that will be found, read, published, after a delay), on a _white sheet_ under erosion, as (my) writing draws to a close (as my writing is no longer my writing), but this is an other story, story of an other, with its own immanent and indwelling poles.) === 83c83 < perhaps impassible landscape; whiteout without the signs of --- > perhaps impassable landscape; whiteout without the signs of 97c97 < other story, story of an other, with its own immmenent --- > other story, story of an other, with its own immanent