Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.20.1704290337560.26054@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Rough grit, the digital, Vito Acconci and others
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2017 03:40:55 -0400 (EDT)
Rough grit, the digital, Vito Acconci and others http://www.alansondheim.org/unman2.png http://www.alansondheim.org/gritd.mp3 The audio is a half-hour rumination on Acconci, arte povera, Soho in the early 70s, the problematic of the digital, and so forth. It's raw; not all of the facts may be correct; I stumble, repeat, gloss over, but it will give you an idea of what the period was like - as well, perhaps, as its relevance today. Ironically, I'd been thinking about these issues for the past week or so, deciding to write on them; when I heard about Vito's death, I thought it best to just talk the material through. It may be a terrible mistake to do this; on the other hand, I felt a need, as well, to deal with the increasingly abstract ontology of contemporary culture - along with the brutal realities beneath the surface. I'm fascinated by prosthetics/robotics for example, but these come at the cost of real workers laid off, of violent desertification in may parts of the world, of wars and raids replete with inconceivable brutality, and so forth. So for me there was a period, hinged among modernism/postmodernism/ digital phenomena when abject physicality, grit, dominated the grid - this is what I'm talking about through impersonal and personal history, etc., in the tape. Please give it a listen if you're interested in these concerns; also, it might be useful if someome transcribed it for publication. Thanks for listening, Alan