Some abstraction


n.otes

thinning, defuge, flattening <--> reduction,    collapse

corrosion, residue, dissolution, dissemination, spew,    emission

thinning and emission epistemologically related
-- emission    (perhaps) implying point-source, teleology (it came from
planet    x)

thinning - information peeled off
-- entropy - permanently    lost

emission - information a mess, implosion
-- hints of origin,    originary trope

the two are related, information disorders
--    information is never disordered; its receptors are (in relation to
codes,    attention, capacity, etc.)

information is in a state of    becoming-information - always hermeneutics

defuge also an    information disorder? decathecting? has to do with
libidinal investment    withdrawn through repetition
'defuge is the information disorder of our    time' (come again?)

defuge in relation to borderline syndrome,    borderline personality
(exhaustive testing of presence) - weakened,    decathected or overly
cathected ('etiquette' of cathect /    cathecting)

spew has wider origin than emission, emission implies some    sort of
coherency in the beginning - spew can be considered flux into    flux
(incoherency into incoherency)

the real is spew - continuous    one-to-many / many-to-one mappings -
chatterings, jostlings

core    dump <--> spew - but not defuge - not impinging on the psyche    -
instead, formal epistemology, archaeology of collapse

defuge -    information not present (was present) but stale - as in
automatic reading,    then returning to attempt rereading

information always already spew -    as read, is edited down, cut into, etc.
- 'spew sliced' =    information

editing down the buzzing of the real (from spew) - machinic    decoding -
it's here that mathesis occurs - i.e. presencing - what emerges    from slag

God implies emission, spew implies, what? psycho-physical    processes, thick
transmissions - nothing that can be _named_

spew -    moil, sourceless = everysource
spew - moil, boil, roil, soil ->    defuge

emission - source, implied, inherent
emission - chatters?    stutters? continuous and discrete emissions

Johannes Lohmann -    operational words (of sorts)
see Kittler -
indo-european clusters /    constellations - spread of phenomenological
domains across (among)    inscriptions

inscription withdraws, decathects, sympathetic
fissure    inheres, cathects, empathetic? (probably wrong way to go here)

Freud on    the uncanny -

fissure and fissure, x and x, inscription, x and    -x

fissure < - > defuge, x and x
defuge (x), i'm tired of all    this (x)

fissure goes nowhere, there's nowhere to go
fissure comes    from nothing, goes to nothing, there's no one to go
fissure - tends towards    analog

inscription is 'everything else' - tends towards    digital

immersion inscribes - into what? fissure? (wrong way    again)
definable fissures - into what? inscription? (most likely    not)

fissure is a priori untheorized, uninscribed

http://www.asondheim.org/Output.mp4

when i talk with incompletion
sometimes there comes a notion
that someone owns completion
an imaginary notion

asking campers riddled questions
is riddling walls of the camps
someone who no longer questions
is no longer roll-called in the camps

grey stained red and sutured mouths
no one ever gets out of here
bodies are nothing but mouths
the rest no longer here

obscene half in obscene half out
this is the primal scene
it never happened or worked out
just repetitious scene

arrows fly like cursors hasten
better get out of the way
space itself seems to hasten
time imprisoned one way

time has no time to rupture time
space is only residue
of time confined to confine time
time is residue

http://www.asondheim.org/thth.mp4

West Virginia University performance text / July 27 2006


Somewhere there's a story in this - machinery of the body or interminable
mechanism of psychosis <> We begin like
this. We begin like this because the image stream is "thus." And it will
take a while to orient - from the playing with the images to the
performance. And except for this typing - there is no difference. Now I
feel embarrassed because some of you have seen sections of these alreaady;
I've been playing with the images for about forty minutes or so. These are
avatars placed into literally inconceivable positions. My name is Alan
Sondheim by the way nd I will be your guide for the evening. Or for as
long as you choose to stay. So as I was saying yesterday, with an avatar,
everything can be assembled or dissassembled - Here is the disassembly of
a vacuum tube in a scanner, digitally deconstructed. What is it that you
can do with machines that you cannot do with bodies? For one thing,
disassembly line - that is eachpart is independent of all the others.
Well, that's not true, but they'll stay that way if you unbolt them.

So one can move in ways that she cannot move, and remain in air outside of
gravity. EVERY HUMAN BEING IS THE RESULT OF INTERMINABLE SADNESS. These
images can be taken apart just like Al Capone. And these images belong
somewhere or anywhere and it's death that returns these bodies quickly
quicly to the position of the machine and its disassembly. So this is
about death, my work is about death, and the absence of language, that
looking out of the window at the last possible moment - and what is THERE
continuing in the midst of cessation - So these people can move butonly
for a short while. HOW LONG IS THE LIFE OF A DANCER? MERce is still going
strong into his 80s just choreography now. But I saw him dance ever so
slowly with a chair. And the chair with thick with the wood and if I'm not
careful I'll cove up all the exciting images again. On the right two
avatar cats with a human avatar perhaps from the Kojiki learning to ride
them in the midst of unfathomable winds. On the left avatar humans
hysterically presenting themselves AS IF they are on the scren within the
screen. On the right the recent Ukrainian revolution covered completely in
the main square in Kiev. On the left and right above - an occupation. On
the left an avatar-violation and that skin moving without tearing or
tearing without moving; to the right the neuraesthenic from the nineteenth
century, lassitude danced out in the middle, in other words disease and
strategies for moving around or through the body. There are times... in
the midst... of the dark wood which surrounds us... when we lose track...
give up... turn away...something has gone horribly wrong... perhaps this
is one of those times... as if the world has stained the world.... Someday
I will write myself... into nonexistence... This is my dream aloud...
uncriducoeurMIAO HOW.... at that point that precise point... between being
alive and being dead... I will divide.. and will divide and will divide...
there will be nothing that remans remains whole... then each segment, yes!
each segment! will retire all the others... the segments...

the segments will slowly disappear... outside of any database... not for
your viewing or my own... oh then things do or do not go together... you
see they lead us somewhere else... those faces on the left... modelled on
a book from World War One - a hidden book - photographs of the wounded - I
still have nightmares - and now in Iraq - people burned over ninety per
cept of their bodies. In this country, this was inconceivable. Not even
Vietnam... you have to go back to maybe Cold Harbor in the Civil War,
something like that... So this is about this is about empyre - and this is
a project - about the end of empyre - and this is a project - about a
certain kind of fury - this is about dance and the stain of dance - this
is about disease and the stain of disease - yes that too - this is about
an entire - a whole - encyclopedia of things! - yes, the encycclopedia
too! the encyclopedia as well! - faces collapsed yes in time - you can
reverse time digitally - double faces - aum and silent or a--- and um--- -
if you understand Shinto you'll get the reference - around Inari -
guardian figures - foxes - one with open mouth one with shut - the
electrical figuration between them - we're in the midst of the grid - the
power grid - it's all around us - you can hear the grid - the antennas
pick it up - the dancer moving around the grid - out in the wilds, well
not wilds but away from the grid - you can hear other things -

World War II was very beautiful... bombers going from England to
Germany... I imagine Iraq is very beautiful too...

In another minute this will look like a dance... a modern dance.. with
mysterious black figures and electronic music...

more dance and more dance... someting about Krishna here but I don't want
to go there -

these are segments of something called the swallowtail catastrophe -
bifurcation points - when there's a sudden shift in behaviour - when
anything can happen - but not "and usually does"

okaythis is Geneva - I'm flying the plane of the President of the United
States... on a bus... (bus + plane = speed of bus) - next to - somewhere -
an image of the tsunami - there's a proximity - about avatars - a nearness
- an uncanny element - you can't define it - they're close - they're
almost touching - and ye... yet... There are changes here... in gender...
positioning - there's a story but I don't know it... - not yet...

what's necessary now - some sort of climax - some way to bring this all
together - I'll find it - climaxes are usually loud - this one is embedded
- in the machine - the back of my mind - somewhere else not there -
somewhere with infantry - so the dancer - Maud - is the crankthat - the
crank that - that drives the map - bang bang bang bang - if she disappears
- the mapp - the map - will disappear - just wait and see - no I won't -
just wait .... damn, its still there...

the world is a mess...

let us give ourselves at the most another two generations...

dusts... radiations... at least you don't have to dream this...
thank you.

silentheads

unutterable sadness, cursor intrusions, head-object or object-head moved
piece by piece, that is spectral redrawing of coordinates given and
through certain trajectories, i'm sure there are disturbances yes for me,
i hear howling just beneath the surface, although these might bounce, much
as a message from me to you, unable to reach its destination, and that is
in fact its destination, in fact, in dream, in imaginary, in virtuality,
of which these are texture-molded from vaginas, testicle, shaft of penis,
sex-heads, silent, silenced, not even a nodding, yes and no
http://www.asondheim.org/quantum.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/silenthead2.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/silenthead3.mp4
[the following are based on motion capture of a dance / avatar construction; wires connect sensors to central computers]
http://www.asondheim.org/stain.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/floordancehysteric.mp4
the basin of our lives, our concavity, neither internal nor an extension,
we're here, there, miniscule, only our loss the richness, fecundity of
world and information time and time again, sheaves of time, of which, just
this text or view or this reading, death coming, infinitude of details
gone forever, slightest creatures, of which we, communalities, surface one
or once or not at all, our unknowingness, rot envisaged in the corpse of
the other, our selves worn like teeth come the death of how many, the
moment after, no longer there, your glance invisible, words unheard, touch
receding down your long corridor, the room the same, view from window,
slough of air, this body no long with basin, with concavity, the thing,
what will you do with it, what will be done with it
body movement translated into bvh file
bvh file clothed in loquacious avatar
avatar lowered onto floor body
hysteric dance of avatar and floor body
mapped dance of one and another
digital seamless wonder transmutated skin
writhe wryte internal electromagnetisms
signals connecting floor body and avatar
avatar desiring floor body hysteric
hysteresis as chiasmic exchange
the one generated the other
the other was clothed in the one
the other above the one
the one beneath the other
coupling hysteresis hysteria
the womb meanders eyes opened shut
bodies stitched together in final fury
doctor doctor there is no help for me
doctor doctor there is no help for us
for her for them
peopling the world of the grainy digital film
stitched together falling apart at the seams
falling apart seamlessly
hysterical out of control contrary
contradictory wayward really fucked up
really fucked up avatar fucked up floor body
say neurasthenic mean hysteric
bvh file long since forgotten
the real. Jennifer is thinking sleazy about her philosophy of immensity,
the stain all in the breadth of a stain on a minor planet. But I made the
angel fuck dirty panties Names roll off the tongue, stain the air
tentative; the signified is recuperated as a stain against a backdrop of
the virtual, stain the wires with my presence, search planetary context,
panties, your stain grows larger, my stain on my conscience, stain in your
*/apologies for removal of some files, i have limited space/*

4-four catastrophe machine in motion capture

4 stationary points with picking up and putting down and rearrangement
18/4 sensors motion capture: _the language returns from the other side_ -
sudden jumps - hyperbolic space - infinite manifolds - closed but yes at
the edges - the corners - elsewhere - beyond anything conceivable - the
body is a compass - the body tends - this way and that way - take a gander
- a look-see - variants on and off the field - of discourse - space-time -
points holding everything back - master or matrix - murmur - the semaphore
of the black hole - nietzsche -

http://www.asondheim.org/velrearrange.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/velputon.mp4h
http://www.asondheim.org/velrearrange2.mp4

killer sons - victim fathers - semiotics of the woman - literally the cusp
catastrophe - or butterfly - the catastrophe machine - in one end and out
the other - heideggerian four-fold holding in abeyance - moves every so
slowly - then swish! - crack! - kwak! -

Unutterably Beautiful

Unusual anomalies in VLF recordings, WV (soccer field, evening):

http://www.asondheim.org/vlfsocr7.mp3

Regular 'stuttering' towards end.

http://www.asondheim.org/vlfsocrground8.mp3

Body grounding and new phenomena.

The atmosphere was incredibly active with dense clusters, trains, and
singular spherics. NASA VLF-3 radio with 8' vertical antenna.

The 2nd mp3 was almost, but not quite, breathing. Stretched dawn chorus
comes to mind.

I believe these are unutterably beautiful.

We have been in West Virginia for close to ten days now on a house-sit. I don't sleep; I worry about money, about survival. I said to Azure that I have to work as hard as I can since it doesn't feel as if I would be able to again. The future is too emptied out, too bleak, and our stay here is unbelievably rich.

Tonight I awake and hear the crickets chirping in the lizard cage. As part of the house-sit, we take care of an anole and gecko. They're doomed, of course; we bought them to be eaten. It's heart-rending; I couldn't own anything that needed live food, food bred for live consumption. There's a metaphor that makes me uncomfortable; I identify with the eaten, not with the eating, most likely part of my depression. We have a cat, who has us, Boojum, and of course we buy food for her as well, back in New York (she is now subject of a chain-linked house-sit). And of course that is also meat; I'm aware of the hypocrisy here, and after she passes, it would be hard, for me, to have another such animal. She is friends with both Azure and myself; this isn't about her, but about all of our footprints on the planet.

For I think to myself, however large or small my footprint, it is too large; it should be reduced. And reduced and reduced. Reduced to nothing, and then some. Disappearing in a hollow occupying as little space, however as much time, as possible. Leaving the rended and rendered earth to itself, and perhaps one cricket better. All one can do is atone and clean up one's own mess and then others and then others and others. But I imagine the emptied footprint, an outline of the passing of a human, all these files and transformations. And the footprint slowlly disappearing from view - slowly, because I have unquestionable pride, and think of legacy as much as anyone else. My legacy however is tinged with regrets, embarrassment; it's peripheral, hardly visible. Culturally, I belong nowhere at all, but listening to the sky is never enough; if I consume it is knowledge, and knowledge's transformations. I am a cultural machine in the virtual; I can't help this, and that is my failing. I - I - I - I- I - am crippled enough to believe that if I don't produce, don't create, I have no reason to simply be. So I am. So I listen to the skies as a reporter, and other works and workings follow suit, and if they don't, then I am not. And Azure suffers daily through this selfish nonsense...

Wasteland


re John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain - analog computer - "each
number is represented by a suitable physical quantity" - in the digital
machine there are markers and combinations. Consider the former a calcu-
lation which is _intrinsic_ to the material world and the latter, one that
is _extrinsic._ Then the former also embodies temporality - there is a
necessity for movement-vectors of material objects; I would argue (here's
the rub) that the latter displaces or flattens temporality. The simplest
example - an analog watch, a digital clock - in the former, temporality is
constituted by indexicality ranging over a _field_ within which projects
forward and backward are simultaneously visible - and in the latter, only
imminence appears - 10:42 does not constitute a vector or transformation
but an abstracted and flattened quantity. Admittedly, the quantity _means_
only by virtue of difference, but the difference - and difference itself -
is negated. In the analog situation, the field is the matrix of difference
which is memory, moving, movement. In the digital, pure function to the
nth-degree of tolerance. In both, deployment and poetics of tempor-
ality within which functionality is a residue - the reason for example for
so many chimes and bells - divisions external to the dial-field, divisions
in concert with labor.

The same phenomenologies occur in considering GPS and atlas navigators.
The former presents the imminent situation of the user (i.e. "you are
here") in relation to a sketched immediate surrounding (just as the
digital clock presents "you are now" - the split between synchronic and
diachronic almost too neat); the latter presents the field within which
the user must locate hirself - a field extending to the edge of the page
and beyond. The same is also of course true for the GPS, but the imminent
positioning of the GPS is over-determined; the map is centered on the user
or hir goal, the map is a production of the user though the GPS for the
user, or a production of the GPS in accord or upon the command of the
user. Like the analog clock, the GPS screen disappears with shutdown; the
imaginary of the screen retreats within the real artifact.

To some extent we are considering only a _moment_ within the digital,
which can map anything anywhere; online maps for example are becoming
increasingly detailed, and NASA's WorldWind is as good a simulacrum of the
planet as one is likely to get. The difference between analog and digital
is increasingly abolished as raster, bandwidth, and databases increase. It
is within the digital-personal, watches and portable GPS, that the dis-
tinction is likely to remain; even personal video/music players are
approaching the analog millennium. The greater the convergence, the
greater the databases and technologies at work, the more labor-intensive
the information regime, the more porous and vulnerable. The distinction
becomes a memory, revealed only when something goes wrong, and the digital
body opens, not to plumbing, chemistry and substance, but to electronic
technologies. And here, too, the distinction converges as bodies take on
the characteristics of cyborg-avatars, and the possibility of organic
computers and displays increases. Thus the world is all image, all screen,
complexity intertwined beneath surfaces; thus the world is porous and
vulnerable itself, susceptible to hacking and axing, conceivable and
inconceivable onslaughts. Just as the nervous system is both digital and
analog, so is the perceptual apparatus (by which I mean from sensor to and
through sensed); one can imagine a horizon of continuous images, sleeps,
dreams, stasis, and eternal death. So let us think of _distinction_ itself
as a stage or moment in time: Lo, the Other will become One, and the One,
Other, and all, or none at all, will bear silent witness to Absence.

Cusp phenomena transfer materials interference/ superimposition/ confluence/ of competing regimes coupled with raster phenomena and and and

and something else, the vortice/ vertex/ apex/ nadir/ flattened - detumescence - deconstruction - defuge of the same - such intermediate variables ! - the rapture -