Exchange Rate

our eyes met. it was at that moment s/he knew s/he'd sign up. I leaned
over to clinch the deal. s/he looked me up and down I was swollen in all
the right places and then some. Chinatour gained another satisfied
customer, hir fantasy money in the bank. let's call this piece Exchange
Rate. geodesics make geodesy. I couldn't forget my future s/he said to no
one in particular. Chinatour will take care of that I said to no one in
particular. :leased hir body hir sheave-skin distended in all the right
places, for what, for Chinatour, the mountain says it all, hir body in the
foreground. I can't see clearly I said, I'm distracted. that's my job,
s/he said, I'm Chinatour, if you look at me I make money for them, you
can't help it, I can't help it, they pay me, they can't help it either.
where do they go I asked. who. Chinatour. s/he replied not to China that's
for sure. I don't know. but they use the Sung backdrop, Fan-Kuin, some-
thing like that, I don't speak the language. you can't see anything s/he
added, the fog's in the way. it's you not the fog I said and let it go at
that. Chinatour gains a point, maybe five. it's more than I'll ever see.
and these photos, incredible. almost like the real thing. there are no
real things around here. they're as real as they get, you just don't see
them. at least I see, s/he replied. at least I see as well I said not
catching the drift into body and fog, sheave-skin and mountain. our eyes
met.:leased hir body for that ad for Chinatour who knew what would come of
the foreground effacing tao-mudra w/ hermit in the distance well s/he
needed monie as s/he said and flight was easy it's our world s/he said,
there's no tao. there's no tao, nothing, not even emptiness, everything
stricture s/he said, you can't have a thing without a frame & a frame
without a thing. but I can fly s/he said & that's the tao of Chinatour you
can always have an image of the thing if you can't have the thing itself.
even emptiness I asked. even emptiness, if there's no way just turn the
screen off, I won't know, time stops when I'm gone, when I'm back it's
like I never left. even if things changed I asked. I begin where I begin
s/he replied. look at me. I'm ready for it. what's that I asked. movement,
process, s/he said, I can't go farther, Chinatour is looking for me:China-
tour, the velvet fog of the world:Chinatour satisfies your customer:China-
tour, the velvet fog of the world:Chinatour, when your day is done ours
ust begins :Chinatour, when there's smoke there's mountain

from ESP-Disk night performance at the Bowery Poetry Club (for Barnacled and my re-release of an ESP recording: http://www.alansondheim.org/esp2.mp3

Apologies for not responding here; I've been working on things like the enclosed . The video contains two avatars; each is created with motion capture used simultaneously by two people (therefore four people in all); the stills are from head and body scans of dancers that are then attached to the avatars; in other words there is an entire community here invisible and visible; dancers are Kira Sedlock and Foofwa d'Imobilite; programmer is Gary Manes; production etc. myself; choreography mixed; technical Azure Carter; created at the Virtual Environments Lab, West Virginia University. For a more detailed rendering of the video try http://www.alansondheim.org/riddle.mov . This work consists of duals, as if the pre- or proto-linguistic self-constructed from oppositions that dissolve into the abject.

outline of emanent research

(note while the notions of 'code,' 'coding,' 'decoding,' codework,
underlie almost everything below, they're not explicit - nor are the
actions of reading and writing. the actions can be considered emergent
phenomena, and the notions as primitives in the sense of members of a set,
etc. again, the analog and digital phenomenologies are implicit as well,
as are the (related) concepts of abjection and purification. the analyses
of these comes out through praxis, attention to detail, thinking through
mandalic structuring until the scaffolding leads, not to silence, but to
tending. this should be clearer as the work progresses.

i should note that the following is both a constitution of my usual/cur-
rent directions and most likely too ambitious. the trajectories circulate
around formal systems and their psychoanalytic/psychological receptivi-
ties, around emanents and 'true worlds,' around edge phenomena which turn
towards the uncanny and abject, around languages, bodies, sexualities,
communalities, and inhabitations. i have increasingly worked through
buddhist philosophies, the analogic and digital at the limits, notions of
'dis/eased' philosophies, deathing and uneasy worlds. now that i have a
clear time to think through these things, the outline below is useful as a
guide; for that matter, it's a guide to the past few years of the 'inter-
net text' as well.)

I. motion capture: this conjures up external behavioral characteristics
translated into internal processes (penetration, scale, displacement,
torsion, according to various geometries). think of mocap behaviors
operating within a constrained field with strange attractors / catas-
trophic jumps. continue to develop mocap with new multi-valent sensors
and software rewrites:

1. turning nodes on and off
2. combining nodes
3. mathesis such that node1 = f(node{n not = 1}), or such that
node1 = recursively f(node1)
4. multivalent sensors such that sensor(x) = sensor[{n}]

what are the emergent images here?

what is the possibility of constructing bvh files with additional nodes
determined mathematically from the hardware set? or mathematically from
extraneous data?

what is the possibility of other organic models (i.e. than human or
animal forms)?

IA. data remappings

entry of bvh files into blender:
1. modeled onto abstracted forms
2. modeled onto parent/child forms
3. modeled onto metaball forms

blender file outputs:

1. entry into cave environment: static or dynamic
2. video output
3. what is the possibility of gaming output here? (moving around emanent
environment)
3. second life output: static or dynamic/interactive

IB. interiors

1. standardized interiors: sheave-skin, sheave-organism
2. constructed 'model' interiors: solid, transparent, penetrable,
impenetrable
3. abject fluxed interiors: how should these be constructed?

IC. interior narratologies

1. abject/purified narratologies and emanent interactions
2. abjected/purified contents of dis/ease, dis/order, ecstasy, ekstasis,
catatonia, defuge, death/immobility, sexuality, speech/murmured/
whispered/cried/screamed, body formed/deformed
3. tantric/middleway theoretics

ID. choreographic mocap (see above)

1. additional issues of jump/leap, exhaustion, tether
2. video/photographic output as well as bvh

II. scan

phenomenology of scanning, causality across scanned lines

IIA. small scanner

1. head/speech phenomena dissected
2. schizophrenias and beam-splitters
3. reflections from coils, air condensers
4. static tantric buddha image: sutured, stitched-displaced, node
combinations and splits
5. wounds, scars, lips, genitals, ears

output into .obj files into blender/cave
output into video/still image files

within blender: solve the issue of disappearance/transparency

IIIB. large scanner

1. interior scans: rooms with bodies, reflections, dance-studio,
scan-choreographies
2. exterior scans at bretz coke ovens, persona rapid transit (in motion),
soccer fields
3. mobilized body scans in inert environments: reading 2d -> 3d, nature of
the inference.
3. environmental scans with mobilized and peripheral bodies
5. narratologies of such bodies: violence, chase, jump/fall, etc.
6. choreographic narratologies

III. access grid (open source internet 2 group messaging/environment)

1. distant interaction with emanents
2. readings of the corporate / corporate bodies: photographs/video
3. theory and discussion, levinas, leder, lingis, etc. at the distance
of telecommunications

IV. cave and second life

1. performance and documentation
2. working/running within emanent interiors
3. and so forth

V. goals of the above:

1. what does it mean to be in-carnated within the real/virtual/
true world?
2. what are the edge-phenomena/plastic and static limits of the body?
3. of the geopolitical body? of the political-economic body?
performance: abu-gharayb modeling in sl
performance: abu-gharayb modeling in choreography
4. what are the signifiers of bodily arousal/violence/meditation?
how are these constituted within the real/virtual?
5. readings: what does it mean to read the real body? the virtual body?
6. what are the ontologies and epistemologies involved here?
ontological status of the so-called virtual -
schrodinger's cat paradox and collapse of the wave function as model
for simultaneous analogic/digital readings -
seeing through microscopy (tunnel, scanning, optical, etc.):
are ontology and epistemology equivalent at the limit?
(are analogic and digital equivalent at a parallel limit?)

VI. medical model

1. internals and externals, static/dynamic. remnants of the visible
human project, gendering of the visual/internal
2. comfort, dis/comfort, ease, dis/ease, hysteria and abjection/fluid-
ity (laycock's 1840 essay on hysteria, kristeva, chasseguet-smirgel)
3. dis/ease, hysteria, and so forth of emanents
distorted emanent behavior and body image (gaz)
distorted surface textures and behavior-collisions (sondheim)
distorted worlding, 'bringing one out of the true world' (etc.)
4. medical model and technology
5. psychoanalytics and technology, psychoanalytics of emanents

VII. radio

1. vlf - very low frequency - body interferences with antenna
reception, phenomenology of body coupling with antenna
2. scanner - social, continuous socio-political landscape description.
3. sw - anomalous signals
4. long-wave - anomalous signals
5. crystal - the receptivity of inert materials, primordial radio and
primordial radio culture
6. phenomenology of the antenna/field: materiality of the world as
electromagnetic channeling

VIII. emanents within fieldings, choreographies, edge/boundary phenomena

VIIIA. praxis of edge/boundary phenomena

1. analogic and worn emanent boundaries
2. edge / boundary phenomena - physics and psychophysics of the game-
world edge in second life
3. phenomena of the sheave-skin and sheave-skin internals
4. phenomena of medical models in relation to edge/boundaries

VIIIB. praxis of edge/boundary phenomena with hardware/software

1. edge phenomena in literature, codework, mathesis of the text
(cramer's and reith's programs)
2. edge phenomena within the motion capture software, poser, blender,
calculations for example of sin(tan x) as tan x nears the
asymptote
3. generalization of edge phenomena into the dialectic between tacit
knowledge (polyani) and error (winograd/flores)

VIIIC. live choreographies:

1. foofwa and soccer (edge phenomena, dancesport, etc.)
2. foofwa with crystal radio, vlf radio, etc. in large field
3. sexuality of ballet (nude ballet, classical or genre figures),
gendering of roles, ballet as emanation
4. anita berber narratologies ('annihilation: to the limit!')
5. foofwa dancework at coke ovens
6. 'body-contouring' of dance/geography
the geography of dance, dance of geography, dance geography
7. 'body-contouring' of dance/technology: dance at the limits
of the machine

IX. world-constructions

1. what constitutes worlds? constructing?
world of the text, inhabitation/dwelling/building (heidegger,
dufrenne)
2. what constitutes the true world? worlding?
'true world' in which lines/angles are 'trued' (affine geometry),
'true world' in the sense of 'trued' phenomenologies within which
virtual, real, and ikonic are blurred and interpenetrating, somewhat
equivalent, and within which traditional epistemologies of symbol/
sign/signifier/signified/index/ikon etc. break down (kalachakra
tantra, jeffrey hopkins)
3. 'reading' underlying (substructural, configuration files, guides)
organization of mocap/scan through surface phenomena
(and the relationship of this reading to waddington's epigenetic
landscapes)
4. who is world? communality, consensuality?
the problem of other minds and the problem of consensual other minds
(group hallucinations, vijnanavada, dwarf sitings, ufos, etc.)




===





These images are produced from scanners, motion capture, anything that can analyze or transform the body in unexpected ways. For theory there are the pm.txt, pn.txt, po.txt going up and on at http://www.alansondheim.org/
- please check for details. Thanks

From sondheim@panix.com Wed Jan 2 22:33:
Date: Wed, 2 Jan :33: (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim
To: Cyb , Wryting-L

Subject: Boojum




Boojum


Our cat, Boojum, had to be put to sleep today, in our arms, two days after
her 18th birthday. We were closer to her than most people. She meditated.
She taught patience. We're distraught; she was a good friend, a companion
who helped us through bleak times. She loved olives, asparagus, tomato
sauce. She was beginning to close down; her last purring was about ten
days ago. Losing a companion (Haraway's companion species) is as bad a
loss as any other (in spite of my father, who said, It's not like losing a
person you know). I can't do elegy after days of crying, running to emer-
gency rooms, trying different foods and medication. Below is her Internet
Index, within the crabbed space of my webpage.


her name, boojum, jean-paul, others
her name, boojum, jean-paul, others
her name, boojum, jean-paul, others
her name, boojum, jean-paul, others
name, boojum, jean-paul, others her name, boojum, jean-paul, others her
name, boojum, jean-paul, others her name, boojum, jean-paul, others hear
the despair among the carbon cacti, boojum trees, even in the midst of the
name, boojum, jean-paul, others her name, boojum, jean-paul, others her
name, boojum, jean-paul, others her name, boojum, jean-paul, others hear
the despair among the carbon cacti, boojum trees, even in the midst of the
Aditya A boggart bogle bonachus bonasus bonedevil bonnacon boobrie boojum
hear the despair among the carbon cacti, boojum trees, even in the midst
forgotten. Now, 2007, we are bringing our cat Boojum, this May 29, to Hope
2003 Boojum the cat who adopted me in 1990, developed breast cancer. She
The cat, Boojum, imagining her, the tenor of her fur, quality of her eyes,
:Boojum Carter
Comments by writer: Boojum is named after the Boojum tree in Baja
fury of cancer and creation. Azure and I are beside ourselves, and Boojum
Boojum, our cat, is checked now daily for a resurgence of cancer; we can't
cat, Boojum, imagining her, the tenor of her fur, quality of her eyes,
Boojum Carter Comments by writer: Boojum is named after the Boojum tree in
Boojum Boojum, our cat, is checked now daily for a resurgence of cancer;
cat, Boojum, imagining her, the tenor of her fur, quality of her eyes,
Boojum Carter Comments by writer: Boojum is named after the Boojum tree in
Boojum Boojum, our cat, is checked now daily for a resurgence of cancer;
partner, Azure Carter, and their cat, Boojum.


Boojum Carter (medical report four years ago)


feline, aged 13 1/2, four years after our mother's death, biopsy diagnosed
as follows:

Microscopic: MAMMARY MASS ONE - This mass is demarcated and has a well
localized appearance. It is comprised of a collection of neoplastic
epithelial cells that are forming tubules. The tubules are separated by
variably thick connective tissue septa. The neoplastic cells have ovoid
stippled nuclei and a scant amount of eosinophilic cytoplasm. Cytoplasmic
borders are distinct. The mitotic rate is low and ranges from 0-1 per
high-power field. Nonneoplastic tissue is forming margins. There are
scattered aggregates of lymphocytes and plasma cells surrounding the
growth MAMMARY MASS TWO - This is the larger of the growths evaluated.
There are several large cysts. There is a proliferating population of
neoplastic epithelial cells. The cells are organized in the lobules that
are forming occasional tubules. The central areas of the lobules are
degenerate. Neoplastic cells exhibit invasion. One or two layers of cells
line the tubules. The cells have large round vesicular nuclei with
multiple nucleoli. The cytoplasm is eosinophilic, scant and cytoplasmic
borders are distinct. The mitotic rate ranges up to six per high-power
field. Nonneoplastic tissue is forming margins.

DIAGNOSIS: MAMMARY MASS ONE- MAMMARY GLAD ADENOCARCINOMA, TUBULAR, LOW
GRADE MAMMARY MASS TWO - MAMMARY GLAND ADENOCARCINOMA, TUBULAR CYSTIC

PROGNOSIS: Guarded

COMMENTS: Feline mammary malignancies should be considered capable of
metastasis and warrant a guarded prognosis at best. The first smaller
growth evaluated is well localized and is not exhibiting invasion. This
appears to be a well-differentiated adenocarcinoma. The second growth is
exhibiting invasion and this growth should be considered as having
potential for metastasis. Lymphatic invasion is not identified with any of
the sections evaluated. These growths appear to be excised.

Comments by doctor: Guarded. Felines tend not to recover. She might live
six months, several years, or less. There is no way to tell. She needs
immune system fortification. The doctor wishes her news would have been
better. The question is whether or not the tubules remain within the body.
The cancer could spread rapidly or even go into remission.

Comments by writer: Boojum is named after the Boojum tree in Baja
California. She is thirteen and a half. She exhibits no signs of illness.
She has been my companion and is highly sociable and nervous, She has the
personality, if not the skills, of a brilliant writer. At the moment she
is sleeping, recovering from the removal of her stitches. She travelled
with us to Miami, where she encountered, even indoors, new and interesting
forms of flora and fauna. Azure and I pray that she will live forever.

Comments: That cancer is always the same, disordered, disorderly, a tough
go whose treatment is violent and invasive as well. The well-defined
structure of the body begins to collapse as tunnels are formed through
highly-organized tissue.

Every organism is a world of miracles, and every creature dissolves in the
fury of cancer and creation. Azure and I are beside ourselves, and Boojum
Carter dreams now, not of death.




From sondheim@panix.com Thu Jan 3 08:39:
Date: Thu, 3 Jan :39: (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim
To: arc.hive@anart.no
Subject: elegy for Boojum, our companion cat, we are all poor




elegy for Boojum, our companion cat, we are all poor,


'i can't do elegy' -
this is a poor and sleepless poem -
when something's at the limit there's nothing more to say -
for a moment i might have reversed the process
but heard nothing more than wailing or sounds like an animal -
nothing of crying, just tattered sound -
nothing of warning, fear, existence, trepidation -
nothing can be said on either side of death -
neither this one nor that one -
neither this nor the other -
death is an other -
(eighteen years, and death is an other) -
death is everywhere, death is not around -
(eighteen years, and death is everywhere,
death is poor, death is not around) -
always already other can't speak can't hear can't see -
double needles, of sedative, of anesthetic overdose -
doubled needles -
who are these people & their kindness -
(eighteen years and the kindness of strangers) -
i'm done with it, the other's never done with it -
always the last trip last day last night
last meal last touch last scent last sound -
(eighteen years and the last day and night,
last touch and meal, last scent and sound) -
in and out of the thick of it -
the thick of it never changed -
it stayed dry, viscous, substance and fissure -
it's uncomfortable, stains, sticks to everything -
lives on in us, exchanged, drops to the ground -
crawls out, walks to the sea, drops to the ground -
i can't drop to the ground, i drop to the ground -
there's an elegy on, everyone's there -
she says i think we're at the beginning of speech -
she says she's very sad and wants to go hone -
she stood dry, unattended -
(eighteen years and dry and unattended,
accompanied and unaccompanied, who can go
into and out of the world) -
the fire went out, into the world --
today someone counted elements,
earth, fire, water, wind, air, heat, dearth,
wood, & metal -
(eighteen years and the counting of elements) -
how was the air, the air was cold, bitter,
the wind harsh, we turned the carrier against
the wind, dearth of it all, harboring a flame
until the last, dying in our arms, the metal table,
off to a far wood of hunting -
the world is filled with secret coordinates -
impermanence of the metallic -
she says she thought of the limit -
in a small heaven somewhere -
& now we are silent in the night, existence is silent -
existence crawls, we heard her cries, the catheter
carefully inserted elsewhere in the building -
we held her heat against us, we exchanged heat -
the tablets - prayer wheel spinning above a slow flame -
we couldn't bear to empty her water, clean
her bowl of food, now despair reigns, & in our arms
nothing happened, everything seized --
'this is a poor and sleepless poem' -
without goodbyes, with ill-knowledge,
with infinite regret, with the world undone -
(eighteen years and the world undone) -
ah ah ah ah
ah ah ah ah
ah ah ah ah
ah ah ah ah