Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.21.1802240433010.11170@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: First draft - intro to archive
Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 04:36:52 -0500 (EST)
First draft - Introduction to an additional hard drive for my archive at Cornell http://www.alansondheim.org/sexed4.jpg This might be of interest here. I find it difficult to organize my work - too many strands, too many skeins, Indra's net among a variety of media. What characterizes them - file after file, resonances that seem to disappear into the uncomfortable thickness of soft air. Thousands of files appearing among directories and subdirectories, loose collocations connected by synaptic wolftones. Or something like that. Even the naming of the fields seems problematic. I veer between what once was virtual and what once was the ghost of a physical reality, indescribable. So here's a messay in itself for better or hoarse. Alan Sondheim sondheim@panix.com sondheim@gmail.com Second contact: Azure Carter, azurecarter@yahoo.com, azurecarter@gmail.com Digital Archive, Volume 2 Contents: Audiofiles: The directory contains over 4000 audiofiles, almost all music Music from older ESP archive: ESP is a recording company that has issued two cds and two lps of my work; they ran an archive which no longer exists. Others: Some tracks from other musicians Sony Recorder Files: Notes and conferences The main directory contains music produced for the past 10-15 years. Please note the dates may be problematic, a result of file transfers. The two Laurie Anderson duets were recorded in the early 1970s. Augmented Reality Almost all AR insertions into various spaces with Mark Skwarek. Augmented Reality 3d Various works, partial and finished, produced with AR and 3d. Some collaborations with Sandy Baldwin Cavework Brown University Through John Cayley and Kathleen Ottinger, work produced in Brown's Cave, with Azure Carter and myself. This work was also shown at the Interrupt 3 Festival; see the Interrupt 3 Festival Brown University directory as well. This directory also has materials for a WordHack presentation in New York. Empyre Email List Files Most of this relates to the co-moderation of Empyre (with Johannes Birringer) on the subject of AbsoluteTerror, ISIS, performance in 1914. There is also a subdirectory, Fb-sensitive, a download of Facebook materials from 2/23/2018. From what I can tell, there is no personal information in Fb-sensitive. Eyebeam 4 day improvisation event (which actually ran for 3 1/2 days). With Jackson Moore and Chris Diasparra - we organized a long day-and-night music improvisation with around 50 musicians playing around the clock, at Eyebeam. LIMIT and other CDs Materials gathered from recent cd issues by Public Eyesore and ESP, as well as a Tape issued by another independent company, and older materials released by other companies such as Qbico, Fire Museum, and Porter. National Music Museum etc. Images from the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota, as well as other music-related materials. New Folder February 22, 2018 This is a catch-all for files of recent work, including older fb download, publicity materials, and so forth. The soundsum refers to a 12-hour soundsummit organized by Jackson Moore at Eyebeam. upj contains files and work from University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown. Zaurus 5600 - files from the Zaurus hand-held linux computer I used for a number of years. The j directory contains notes for various conference, seminar, and formal presentations. Axim contains files from an antique HP hand-held. Reversed_impulses, files for Supercollider programs. Newsm, video and stills etc. from the New England Steam and Wireless Museum Steam-up. New PDF February 22, 2018 A collection of pdfs, mostly scientific or ethnographic, that I've used for my work; some other files are there created by me. Places February 22, 2018 This is a directory centered on a number of geographic locations, and worked produced in relation to them: Akkad: Acadia National Park, Maine, 2 ten-day stays, late Fall, bad weather. Ashfield, western Mass. Atlanta and Eyedrum Gallery Audubon Headquarters, Rhode Island Aurora, Colorado, eclipse and landscape Beavertail State Park, Rhode Island Brooklyn, New York Bristol, Rhode Island Cairn images, from a cairn field, Rhode Island Caratunk, woodlands in Rhode Island, examining a large-scale slime mold over a period of time Car crash, Providence, RI, and scatter semiotics Cumberland, Rhode Island Electronic Literature Organization forthcoming meeting, Montreal (potential) Events - texts for event presentations Freeze, Providence River, Rhode island From BC Trip, work done cross-country, driving from Rhode Island to Victoria, British Columbia, including a large-scale work dealing with the 1889 Johnstown flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and images of Mike Metz' work in Iowa City; some of the images shown are from work I had in shows in Spain and Furtherfield in London Jewish, for a conference presentation in Minneapolis Kingston, work from my hometown in Pennsylvania, including riparian lands around the Susquehanna with unusual fungi and slime molds, also images/work from Washington, D.C. London, work from Furtherfield show, pieces created around and through London and its outskirts, presentation and gallery materials, subdirectory of other work and images from Aurora, Colorado, rw is Roger Williams, photographs I made of 17th-century manuscripts with an emphasis on sachem signature marks MacGrid, work done in or related to the MacGrid virtual world in Canada; it originated, at least in part, from Hamilton, Ontario through David Smith Maine, second group of images and work from Acadia National Park Mark Esper WTC Images: Mark was a close neighbor who took photographs on 9/11 from our roof in Brooklyn; he died several years ago. We miss him terribly. Martin, restoration of a very rare 1917 Martin parlor guitar I use in concert. Mycology, images of fungi, lichen, and slime molds I use in my work. NJ, from Newark and vicinity, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology NNY, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Yonkers working with Stephen Dydo NSCAD, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and elsewhere; in 2014 I was a visiting artist at the college for five weeks and made a great deal of work; this directory is a record of that and includes work that was seminal for me in thinking about the semiotics of 'gamespace, edgespace, blankspace' and splatter semiotics Omaha, Nebraska, work and images from the area. Pratt, texts with accompanying images and videos for a three-hour presentation at Pratt art school, New York PRT, video of rapid transit system at WVU, Morgantown, West Virginia Sachuest, images and work from Audubon site, Rhode Island Shows, materials for the Asturias, Spain, and London shows, as well as materials for an Art Papers article, Atlanta Walden Pond and Concord, Mass., work done around the pond; like a great deal of other 'winter photography'; I try to work with the geology of ice in image and text Washington DC, images and work from earlier trip to Washington. This ends the Places directory. Second Life, February 22, 2018 Work from Opensim, Opensim localhost, MacGrid, and Second life; the alanstl and bvh files stem out of the work I did in Morgantown, WVU, West Virginia (Virtual Environments Laboratory), as well as Columbia College, Chicago, through Patrick Lichty, and NYU through Mark Skwarek. Thanks to Sandy Baldwin and Frances van Scoy at WVU. This motion capture work has informed everything I've done for a decade or so; virtual worlds, coupled with the concept of flesh/internalized bodies, structure a phenomenology of the future for me. Three Snapshots of my Website http://www.alansondheim.org/ snapshotalansondheim.org04252016 snapshotalansondheimorg2014 snapshotalansondheimorg02222018 This is my main website, which has limited (around 26 gb) storage; it's commercial. So at this point, when I add a file, I often have to take another out. These three snapshots indicate that. I also put up files on YouTube at this point; their originals are most likely in New Folder or elsewhere. At the moment you can find the proper urls in the text files. All of the text files, still images, and audio files are only at alansondheim.org. The advantage of the webpage - which itself is only in the form of a directory - is that you can bring the most recent text file to the top; if you go through that, you can also find the most recent videos/sound/stills as well. If you use linux you can download the entire webpage; you can then use the grep command to locate a particular topic or video file. It's easier to do all of this through the following directory: Snapshot of Panix February 22, 2018 I have used panix.com for at least twenty years as my main portal to online. It's run out of New York, is an old and secure ISP, and uses terminals and unix. I do my writing, for the most part, in a linux terminal. The advantage? Secure with no ads and no distractions and easy access to scripting. The main directory housing all the texts I write and put online is ~/texts/ or just texts - if you go to that you find a huge number of text files. If you search them (through grep or other command) you can find topics that might be of interest; if on the other hand, you find a video file in the directory, you can find its description in texts. There are also articles here, an autobiography, perl and other simple programs, etc. Everything in panix is here, except for mail and various personal files. There are outlines for talks, various stages of some articles, even some of my books in manuscript form. It's the heart of my work, I think. SuperCollider files These files are used with the SuperCollider program; they were written by Luke Damrosch after lengthy discussion with me about the conceptual foundations of sound. I'm particularly interested in an impossibility - reverse reverberation in real time - and we came up with various theoretical and phenomenological approaches, which Luke implemented. The result is an incredible variety of musics and sounds, culminating in the LIMIT cd. The programs have a number of variables which can be altered; they provide an experimental framework as well. Varied Now There are a number of subdirectories here; muu for example has images of fractal paths generated from (modified) programs I wrote years ago in qbasic, using formulas of my own; I was fascinated by these for a long time and can run them again in dosbox. The nasa files are produced from NASA software that was originally created for image analysis; the result is a different way of looking at bodies still and/or in motion; dynamics1.mp4 will give you a good idea of the processing (the initial image is that of a distorted avatar). Newnow contains a wide variety of images I've used in presentations. Various Video Here is another repository of video work; it includes two subdirectories, wtc - with three 9/11 videos - and ackeretc, which contains the old Blue Tape files as well as some related work using motion capture equipment and AR. There are also some texts, related to the Blue Tape, written by Ana Maria Pinaka, an artist whose PhD thesis featured it among other works, including her own. The archivetree.txt is slightly out of date, but gives a good idea of the various directories and their interrelationships. Please contact me for further information, or any information you might want concerning specific files. You can find out more information about my work on Facebook, G+, and a rather outdated Wikipedia page. Alan Sondheim, sondheim@panix.com , sondheim@gmail.com (please use both)