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Wednesday, August 01, 2007



b.c. a.d.

Analogical, used by way of analogy
Analogically, in an analogical manner
Analogicalness, the quality of being analogical
Analogize, to explain by way of analogy
Analogous, having analogy
Analogy, resemblance between things

Digit, three fourths of an inch, the twelfth part of the diameter
of the sun or moon; an number expressed by a single figure
Digitated, branched out into divisions like fingers

Electre, a mixed metal
Electrical, Electrick, attractive without magnetism
Electricity, a property in bodies, wherebye, when rubbed, they
draw substances, and emit fire

(Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, 1823)




Yes, yes, of course.


I am God and when I die God is dead.

(There's little time left to speak to Me.)
(I'm not leaving a forwarding address.)
(Come to think of it.)
(Offerings don't count.)
(Pretty much anything you have to say.)
(Thank you for listening.)


Our Wonderful Picture of the Month!

What happens when the image of a text becomes the archaeology of the text
itself? Let's find out in this wonderful image by Alan Sondheim. He says:
"I took this with a Canon 630 set on flash and automatic. The image is a
shelf in my local bookstore, full of works connected with "theory" and
other intellectual pursuits. But everyone knows that books like knowledge,
decay, and I thought, how can I hasten the process? I experimented with
many filters and pencil bandwidths, finally settling on an ideal transfor-
mation, in which a few of the titles like Doubt are just barely visible. I
hope to continue in this vein; the best thing about digital photography is
that no one needs to see your failures, and there are so many successes!
I'd advise anyone to just keep their eyes open, to shoot what they know,
and to shoot as many images as possible. You'll find that one golden one
in the mountain of dross, but it's always worth waiting for. And with
digital, you can just shoot and shoot and shoot! It costs almost nothing
to make mistakes, but takes a great deal of editing and creative energy to
find that one perfect image, the one that dreams are made of." We are sure
that Alan will continue to make these "perfect images," and we will all
enjoy them. This is a far cry from our Sunset Composition we began with,
just a few months ago! http://www.asondheim.org/thelatest.jpg


Subject: Stress Fracture

View

This is the view from my desk which is neither in Paris nor the Black
Forest; it faces nothing but bleak development, projects, urban wasteland
scheduled for drastic over-development, still opposed by Develop Don't
Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) in what is increasingly appearing to be a losing
battle. How can one expect literature from such blight, nature pushed out
to the limit, pigeons with missing toes resulting from frostbite, squir-
rels huddled in backyards along with jays and almost invisible mourning
doves? Everything protects itself; humans are the dominant species and
everything, including other humans, is prey.

So don't can't expect literature, only theory crippled by screams and auto
accidents; you can't expect proper grammar and spelling - those literary
matters - in the face of screeching cars and sirens.

http://www.asondheim.org/windowview.jpg





Uselessness of Monoculture


I will call 'monoculture' anything before the advent of the Internet - in
particular artworks, literature, theater, dance, etc. etc. This culture is
characterized by the singular; even when dispersive anatomies are present,
they are always in opposition or subtext to traditional thought. The mono-
lith is always present and accounted-for. The monolith is either station-
ary or process- movement- oriented, always static or dynamic; its elements
cohere, separate, are born to die, to be reborn again. This is the culture
of the traditional university but it is also urban culture, street-corner
culture; it is the culture of history and historiography, of the encyclo-
pedia and the expert and think-tank. Monoculture resolves, whether towards
resolution or irresolution; it is possessed by narratological impulse, by
development and the compass. Monoculture is not necessarily unary; there
is multiplicity and the nomadic, beneath the stars, within it. Monoculture
blinds us to the world; it is the World that is all the case. It is the
culture of gas, liquid, solid, electrostatics, electrodynamics, special
and general relativity; it is the substance of quantum mechanics insofar
as action may be defined as action or verification at a distance. In sum,
it is our sum, our summation, our accountancy of the world and of our-
selves, and it is useless, as the result of an Internet that is neither
singular nor plural, neither present nor absent, neither coherent nor dis-
persed; I will call 'Internet' what has corrupted monoculture, tended
towards its demise. I am not implying that 'Internet' in fact or fiction
signifies anything, that the name means; it may, in fact or fiction, be
characterized imprecisely by insigification, spews, abjections, blurs,
avatars, nothing at all.

For the change that has come about within and without the tangled skein,
holarchy of networkings, is of the plasma or swarm; it is Wolfram's
science, not Hertz's. Thinking through social sites, collaborative facting
and fictioning, wikipediatry, avatars of avatars, bots and phishing, what
comes clear is lack of clarity, lack of clarity's epistemology. This is a
fundamental transform to the extent that anything is fundamental at this
point; it sweeps away, for example, plots and allegories, bureaucracies
and governments, minds and bodies. Think of pre-Internet novels - novels
of modernism or post-modernism, of constructed and conceptual weavings, of
characters or lack of them. And television, theater, cinema, follow suit;
one is locked into farther time, father time, to diegesis, to an unravel-
ing that characterizes experimental film as well. Neither film nor paint-
ing are linear, but both participate in a locking-down of perspective, no
matter what openings, contusions, are on the horizon.

Lacan, Gardner, even Bateson presaged multiplicities; in Wolfram the swarm
is simultaneously organized and disorganized. Lacan never went far enough;
there was that reliance on language, no matter how shifted. It comes down
to this: When I read a novel, I don't recognize myself, the 'times,' any-
thing. When I watch a show on television, there are actors, people, or
animated actors. They're moving through familiar antiquated monolithic
space, proscenium or deep space - it makes no difference; there's always a
perspective. Perspective invades novels, stories, the world of monolithic
writing - on the other hand, try assigning a vanishing-point to MySpace or
even Facebook. Even Second Life, which tends towards classical perspec-
tive, falls apart on the edges where the simulacrum of physics is turned,
churned upside-down. One doesn't recognize (oneself or others) in Second
Life because recognition is already a problem; everything moves within the
aegis of Bell's theorem.

Consider photographic apparatus: begin with camera obscura, that one-to-
one allegory of the real - through Daguerre, view cameras, stationary then
moving then Edgerton. Cameras dissolve into swarming components; now com-
ponents themselves disappear as cameras transform into light-sensitive
holarchies, networked or independent, under whose or what control? The
image ends up everywhere and nowhere at all; no longer is it allegory -
which has long since disappeared - but the stuttering of the fragment
which no longer is in need of suture or extension. You can watch family
trauma, physical and mental abuse, on the morning talk shows, but whose
families? whose abuse? whose perspective? It doesn't need to end up on
YouTube; YouTube provides its own violence, its own parameters of liter-
ally unfathomable streams. Videos are removed if found, if from copy-
righted material; everything gets through, leaks. But leaks from nothing -
the culture, non-monolithic, Internetted, leaks without transmitters,
receivers, leaks without channels, or leaks from traditional channels,
only to be churned back, lost in brackish protocol.

Code, programs, codes, protocols, reference one another, are increasingly
open-sourceless; scratch the surface and no one's there, nor beneath the
surface - all those dead-ending projects on SourceForge ending up maybe
somewhere else, maybe vaporware, the languor of the name. Languages embed
languages; soon they'll be without physical foundation for all intents and
purposes, perfectly floating signifiers shattering against subroutines and
useful or useless misuses. (The world doesn't end either with a bang or
with a whimper; there is no world to end.)

This confusion is on the ground as well - in some places, Harry Potter
really is a witch; children suffer as a result. It doesn't take electron-
ics; it takes nothing more than extinctions, overpopulation, global cli-
mate change, weapon distribution, religious fanaticisms, starvation,
desertification - the unsupportive world. Radiations swirl around the
farthest villages; there are unheard broadcasts, music, news, exhortations
to the perfect religious life, promises of vacated paradises. These places
or spaces are the future of the novel; language dissolves without signifi-
ers, without that place where the sememe holds, however tenuously. It's
here that home is found, in the bombing of the home, categorization of
flora and fauna, ethnic cleansing. Online real explosions transform into
hacking, thousands, millions, of MySpace friends, hundreds of millions of
blogs, billions of Wikipedia pages hardly ever under contestation. Yes,
it's all true. Yes, none of it is.

Monolithic culture prepared the battlefield inhabited only by the wounded.
Monolithic culture developed the technology of multiplicity and the plasma
- a multiplicity of multiplicities, never stationary enough for analysis,
never moving enough for a coherent dynamics to emerge. It's a memory to an
extent, to the extent that memory is encapsulated in fast-forward media
already forgetting what was loosened in the habitus.

This is all electronic, all colonial, all nanobot, this isn't your fath-
er's monoculture, your mother's multiplicity, your father's multiplicity,
your mother's monoculture. Capital seeps everywhere as do heat and water;
island nations are disappearing in the Pacific, Atlantic not far behind.
Think of this as the anxiety of diminishing power; surely, not only is the
world out of control, but control is as well. What happens to feedback in
chaotic domains? One likes to think fecundity, fractal, but in the real
this holds only so long before 'things' bottom out in rust and tumors.
Monoculture is always waiting in the wings; as networks decay and data-
bases turn useless, big iron will descend upon the world. But this is far
in the future, a future so defined that no one will see it, no one will
inhabit it. Instead of now, we are pre-sent, always in a state of arrival;
there are endless tracks, monorails, they go nowhere, sink in dust,
desiccation.

This is all electronic, and as technology miniaturizes, improves, perhaps
these skeins will continue, sheathed, to exist, transmit, transform, no
matter what. Then the scenario simply holds longer. Consider: There are no
species. There is no real life, no organic life, no artificial life, no
patented life, no constructed life. There is network life and one hopes
that the remnants of wilderness (which are not to be deconstructed) remain
that way, that enclaves succeed where management hasn't. Consider: There
are no persons; there are couplings, situations which grow increasingly
small and temporary, imminent decisions. Consider: Immanence has disap-
peared, if it were every anything more than mythos; it's replaced by the
Facebook contact, as enunciations are replaced and replicated by 'What I
am doing now.' Consider the usual: We are all audience; none of us are
watching; we are all watching; there is no 'we.' It's the latter Lacan has
missed; there is nothing to talk about. These essays themselves are thin
sheaves, interspersions; they carry the dim light of the dusk into the
dusk. 'Beyond' means absolutely nothing; time is indicated only by the
stoppage of death. What is a store if not a mouse-click or twitch? What is
a body if not blown to pieces by a car-bomb? On a certain undefined level,
these are identical. Perhaps an economic level. Perhaps in the poetics of
disappearance.

To be in pain, slaughtered, wounded, is two-fold, interior, exterior. The
former stops everything; it is unthinkable, unbearable. It is always other
even when ourselves. The color of time disappears without witness. But
exterior - this requires transmission, a receiver, political economy, some
means of noise control. The receiver must be receptive, must orient itself
towards the message; otherwise the message remains noise, death. The
receiver must have space place for reception, a moment off the network
which in the very real, idiotic inert real, may be what has brought her to
this moment. But the receiver is already dissolving and a hundred-thousand
new novels are being born, and they are not novels, nor histories, but
software biographies perhaps. Rather than monoculture, monolith, let us
say multlathe, uncontrolled or multiply-controlled lathes refashioning,
refiguring, configuring, what we are reading that was once literature.
There is great exhilaration, great promise; multilathing, in its bypassing
any and all absolutes, is always in process of permanent deconstruction.
Think of the school essay, modified, bought, sold, dated, outdated, online
and offline, assembled, reassembled, spell-checked, recreated, plagiar-
ized, written on demand, printed on demand, behind wikipediatry, related
to class, gender, sex, race, nation, religion, handedness, all or none.
Think of the essay reader, the recipient, following through with programs
designed to weed out the copy which is always already a copy, hacking his
way through the sememe looking for miscreants, passing results to and from
university and institutional databases, listening softly to the YouTube
song, exchange of draft letter on Gmail, or just listening to Ipod Itunes
with her Ii. The whole world is steganographic, embedded, uninterpretable,
piecemeal, exchanged.

So for better or worse monoculture is dead; it grew on foreign soil, is in
the process of recession. To what? To the corners of vulnerable data-bases
and technologies, conservationists, those disappearing from the present.
The future were there, pre-sent, and it's why novels and paintings and
just about anything before 1985, say - _not_ 1968 - is inconceivably
quaint, something for school credit, nothing more. We need an ethnography
of our own pasts presented as disappearing cultures or archaeologies
written in the unreadable, spoken in the unspeakable; it is here that our
bodies once reproduced and never reproduced in the continuing acceleration
of images - of someone or other or no one at all.

(I'm not good enough; I'm not smart enough: You may think this is tempora-
ry or not-me, not-I, that this is elsewhere, of an other, an other genera-
tion, place space, time, time before death. This is not the bicylist who
was injured on the corner of Fifth and Bergen three days ago, but this is
her/our interior, her/our political economy, what comes about in the midst
of architecture and physics. I want to talk about the pleasure of novel-
reading, Harry Potter and other accelerants, and their fan- and enclave-
existence. I want to talk about radiations and dusts and their dispersions
and what they carry from prions to nanogarbage to pollutions to sex to
early deaths from bullets and asthma. I want to talk about mash, I want to
perform djay vjay Vday vdday. I want to be you or someone. Rimbaud knew he
was splitting up. The last of the obscene has passed, the obscene is al-
ways passing: the ob-hack fractured and visible. The last of the discourse
too.)



Nagarjuna 1 2 3

You are singing no space, place, spatial distinctions cumber observation,
the annihilated self. How so. Speak no speech, to be spoken to, undisting-
uished distinction, in zazen in walking meditation, hearing is the space
of the heard. My bones are ornaments, my neck Buddha's, my eyes Nagarju-
na's. Pratyahara, withdrawal, without rasa, flavor, fervour. Breathing is
the body's violence, meditate your corpse, you have it, you are singing no
home, no home singing, you are singing no home singing, you are singing no
home singing no home singing, you are singing no home singing
http://www.asondheim.org/buddha.mp3



Bhaga


"Two lives there certainly are not; -- nevertheless an extra body is
visible, by reason of the Shadow-Sickness."

" Naga-tabi no
Oto wo shitaite
Mi futatsu ni
Naru wa onna no
Saru rikombyo. "

( Lafcadio Hearn )

What is foretold by gong is foreshadowed by memory of its telling.
True, but emergence she said.
She said true, but emergence.

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



notes on code:

study of huddling http://www.asondheim.org/huddled.mp4

Major modality:
Relationship between modeling and codework:
mapping within the subtext/substructure of the metric.
Visual modeling: Visual as thetic - modality of happenstance (i.e.
modeling becomes dependent on the physiology of visual bandwidth).
Aural modeling: Visual with similar field, different spatial modality.

How is the thetic (is that the correct word?) in relation to ideality?
Does political economy depend on visual/aural physiology?

Scanning as doubled text: coded software / parameterization of the real
tending towards results which are residue (separate the results from the
structure). But within the phenomenology of the real, the results and
structure are inextricably tangled.

Motion capture (mocap) - see scanning. In scanning, the static object is
standard; in motion capture, the dynamic object. Think perhaps of the
latter in terms of a second-order differential - doubled modeling of
changes (1. through mocap; 2. through 'accelerated modeling').

The results: the 'code carapace' or chiten - Barrier/revelation code.
(Older work: The relation of consciousness to structured systems: what are
the manifestations of those systems?) Code as armor.

Seeing and hearing seem 'tawdry,' unable to sustain the abstracted or
philosophical weight placed upon them. To see or hear text philosophically
churns on transparency; everything else stumbles. We turn to writing
because it gets away from us to the extent that it's also reflective of
deep abstraction, alien-code (all code is alien).

All code is alien because it calls from elsewhere - or rather, doesn't
call at all; it's as if someone created it, it's as if it wasn't created,
not a bit of it.

Which is the fundamental phenomenological status of code: some of it is
created, but some of it isn't.



What was here -


Second Life residue / theory, Sandy Baldwin, Alan Sondheim:
On avatars and avatar escapes, July 26 performance -
duplication eliminated -

[13:23] Gesture is missing from database.
Eifachfilm Vacirca Online
sandy Taifun [13:29] Taifun: My avatars! little people!
I have moved into the interior of avatars...
avatars speak with a thousand voices. Mon poupees.
DO WE NOT BREATHE AS ONE PERSON? ARE HUMAN?
murmur constantly, you can hear them just beneath surface, in my heart,
gasps air, dolls
[13:30] They run around everywhere, underfoot. will play song, aire,
jig or rondelay!
vectored human
define an avatar as organism which infinitely repairable
not
within and without semi-geodesic space paralleling
i'm becoming avatar-man dream-woman.
natyasatrotpatti: mythical origin work
You begin to understand that all are bots expert systems some symptoms
am
preksagrhalasksana: characteristicis playhouse its different parts
You: ==/222
Well, there's no more it, his writing discourse itself getting stale.
He's taken bend
trundles bundles towards future; we're there carrying than our share
avatar's, where there, so heard
Just like those pirouettes, if were body at center them. Her skirt kept
flying up, was nothing
SQUEAK forever now hold your peace; this life, do lease on any other,
left,
rangadevatapujana: worship deities connected stage
upangavidhana: gestures minor limbs such eyes eyballs eyebrows nose
cheeks lower lip chin mouth
fifty industrialized nations incincerated 250000 Iraqis ARMED POLITICS
ANNIHILIZATION science baby, camera absurd linkage VOLUPTUOUS SHOCK
VIGOR BODY FRAME "TREE" "SEA" "SKY" "I" GO AWAY red pepper boiling
vinegar teach marks PHILOSOPHY OF VIRTUAL BEDROOM AVATAR immortal
sacred heater language train pet
ritual-objects-insignia-power-substitute-spiritual-satellite-enchanted-l
ove-exposure-regulative-transaction-corruption-norm
acquire baody others - blood milk urine shit face value social
universal perversion contract law coordinate field
rudding odors sweat vaginal semen ova decompositions bacteria
vegetation hummingbirds sparrows flies mites "i detest her because i
know well" imitate her" curse felt"
OOH AHH YOU AAH YOUR YOURS ARMS criminalization society = transactions
portions feed decay protodocument libertinage rules for outcries
screams unnatural acts after-image liquefy vaporize crime shortcircuit
dissipate thickness passion trigger calculate
sinews muscles mecoming glands libs blotting out muscular enervations
loose wet chest become
semiotic comic witness extreme pleasure speech reduction crushed
conspiracy integral monsters torso split big brains
cipher OUTRAGE THE NORM ASSAULT SUCH EQUILIBRIUM BLAZE SCREAM solitude
essential limit stranger shout
metallize starched nurse uniform wanton hands liquify atmospheric
electricity markers lust muddies turgid light idols
vaseline-coated lens streets orchid limb thrust meter possessive
handgun GIMME SAY AM DYING remaining suspended fondly animal fur
feathers root dank hummus flake caress fabric come silk leather seesaw
horse hump transact mire ossify
slime
fluminescens
hardness bones rods collapse secretions belly giggling jelly swamps
fetishize solidify sweating gleaming belts boots powdered
male milk-sap LIFE FLUID EXCESS BLOOD PUMP fluid conduity neuter
identity self hunt economy dyad eat wife-force co-
[13:31] phallocratic mach bullshit rights WIT NONSENSE RICOCHET HEART
CLANDESTINE NIBBLES ocean illuminated plastic box motor, tiny
heels depilated legs job musculature buildt gym scar liquid hand
movement want man woman PEFORATED LOBES EARS HIS NOSTRILS TUSKS BEAKS
CLAWS PLUMES SHELLS PATHS FEAST
hillbill
monoculture
SURFACE! SEX! SHADOWS! ELEMENTS! PINK MUFFINS! COUCH EARTH! DUCK LIPS!
MANDRAKES!
small creature half-hidden seaweed brown drag undertow hermit crab
shell smelled moist ebb doorway
[13:32] corpse color remains when their unreality has been demonstrated
becomes eye longer stimulation retina world declares odorless song wind
trees
remediations, mediations, projectivities, introjectivities,
phenomenologies, histories, mechanics, Extruded intruded (upon) body:
cleansed bodies continuous middle-eastern 'war'
armored imaginary journeys (Rhine, England); sexualized bodies:
o avatar, rise midst maelstrom, sadness cobalt plutonium uranium radium
seriously, what covers pain completion, yours argon xenon neon, whirl
me through infinnnnitude drugs
file sex fuck suck cum avatar.
knife skin watch solo sexatar watch.
shades avatars-- precognition behavior collision transparent
interpenetration gave new Life Avatar Body moves would move had File
called God
attempting escape vectors result avatar-work led 15:47:47 There
constructed motion capture equipment 15:48:08 images laser scanning
check Love War, Avatar, Cyborg, Experimental conferences.
{avatars backed, back infinite space}.
digital sublime, space}
imitating real-life people right, imitatin avatars.
refuse moon-bay, moon-bay. avatars, (digital) sublime; backed
, well, these torn apart, By What May AsK?
sublime
backs against wall space; nowhere left go.
elsewhere
The disappearance branch hardened rock occasional artifacts.
itself, image-avatar, ghost. ghost travels anything course; coordinates
tacit knowledge electronic Every symbol ligament avatar; every referent
gesture; gesture procures body; speaking
spectre doll faerie wraithe hobgoblin troll tengu kappa presence
cloth stitch suture binding closing damming holding velvet cotton wool
"Consider next smearing thinking skin.\n";
Kamishibai, virtual idols, PlayKiss
Nikuko, Meat-Girl, (among others) 'emanation'
another dead ok you're hearing imitation 78 record created event very
low frequency
help. 16:04:35 explore 'body-avatar' issues
tobother less! 16:07:11 dancers live yes 29-Jan-2007 16:07:18 In fact
they something head pieces did while ago but excusable! went
somewhere, said something!
beginning transparency, wizard listening-posts MOOs example. Here we
are, becoming-virtual still.
Given danced-to-infinity motion-capture second=life quasi-avatar
tethered somewhat distanced
image 'break through' private barriers course consequence
"one by one, each line alone, typing Control-d done.\n";
$name calls forth $a[$gen1] $noun[$non], hungered, making things.
$prep[$pre] $a[$gen], $a[$diff], $[$gen], $str?
system("touch .trace; rev rope >> .trace"); system("rm
rope");
"Your inscription finished, thing.", "\n\n" 3 < $g;
fly it. takenpart apart llnhx 2.2.6.::attributions Devour Blue
Nattributions Brought Forth lntarn$l karnals, bhckats pf mpdhlas,
Attempt grapple ungrapple Death Star Galleon (s0): h boarding Flying
Dutchy (f0) Dutc
Sound wood wire: alpine zither:
wish home computer with.
avoid swords. swords make angry.
avatar-meat representation uncaptured remembering origins / scars
ancer ancer/avatar ancer/ancer ancer/igital igital ancer.
ancer{}igital{{}}avatar{}analog. igital{{}}avatar{}analog.
deconstructible
level deconstruction
engineering reverse "My leashed, logical thought, protocols thought;
it's wonder think al
One cannot reach farther one's reach, closer control release,
dissipation. Enter reality world, suffused sound.
Over Lord 1 Quon: tone war... Wings creak, sound beginning.
(Subtitle)
Haruka: "Why blue?" That's wondering. Ayato stops turns toward Har
MACHINE coursing trapped blood, flush spirit vaporized, substitute
bodypart another, apparatus obstinancy, prick
machine: undoes belt buckle him, finds right diagram support weight,
tongue, zone, other love
MOUTH LETS CHAINS SENTENCES, RAMPLES, GIGGLES, TONGUES SPREAD WET OUT
OVER LIPS, LEAKS, COLLAPSES, MELTS, FINGERS
[13:33] don't listen avatar-man. dream-woman contaminated. building
condemned.
transformed early version 'outt' blue construct-space outt-structure.
avatar-video avatar-performance content degree.
sukara, dakshinanila, nandiskandhardhara, dhurya, prakata,
pritvardhana, aparajita, sarvasattva, govinda, adhrita
prefer small, seeping, peripeheral, marginal, scattered words
sites, domains, emanations, emissions, interwoven sharing coagulated
ego/s, matrices, languages, bodies.
break down here, use me? absjure, abjure ... moments ?
words, drops say drizzle
everything moment you, mmmm... matrix, mother, maternal, announces edge
frame dialog, carried forth...
times smooth us, bits bytes, protocls lost smoothing functions traced
across peripheries, margins
coagulating limpets seas jellies
made, women, sounded, resonated, protocol, site open winds
you've before, over again, repetition goal delibery interval...
bring about semblance face, lineaments mouths, elsewhere, sides things
often lure seduction among here relates Lacanian objet a, deferal....
future Net, it attains state _seamless reality,_ melding real
disturbances way tending _psychosis,_ interweaving realities, respon-
sibilities claim
Avatars always disturbances, irruptions language, lang- uage portending
_the raveling existence essence
appear erasures also visible, letters disappearing reverse.
dark dreams, enough soft limbs, mine...
matrix saves ending, pureness salvaging spaces...
subject other/ near side screen
tangled avatar-sites/sights/citations. @create $thing begging.
clear speaker herself separate creations. Voices, voices!
Each participant occupies represents (virtual) constituted written
begging object number #75438.
margins, slippages, constitutions, constructs, emergences "depths"
software hardware, blockages flows
only taking account, well surface manifestations possible comprehend
subjectivity
These develop limits program, reveal substructures/protocols violate
dialogs
stick-like _anime_ figures work, distributed authorships anatomies.
consider _projection self_ appearance various applications
audiophiles app arounds bio blogs awk biomes tion tr
We look ruptures characters resonating interfering configuration files
exe everglades
empathetic encapsulations episteme extasis entropic extensivity fantasm
externality [13:34] package: knives. prims cut.
talks. inside he says. construction torsion edge-space. world.
anorectic
[13:35] =====/999
original
/www
/bbb
/qqq
eggs
placenta cloaca
3/333
[13:36] [13:37] [13:38] ====/ggg
[13:39] [13:40] [13:41] ====/;;;
/'''
/zzz
/xxx
oooo [13:42] [13:43] [13:44] [13:45] egg
[13:46] =======nous sont
nous sexdrive florescenece
font wack
centimes
centimez
=nous sens
hung eagle
news sense
[13:47] sonnet rect fluu
KJHKL
help send [13:48] buttons liquids
wiffle
()(*)
black rose thorn
ewwt hmmmmxxx
[13:49] stem baby cell
fine germanaachec
===if tyype won't be still during period fingers moving elsewhere.
/yyy
[13:50] pistol sucking fisted hair
given up how many lines ascii
==if type fight iraq thoughts [13:51] freedom else
return
lima lamina [13:52] ==/eee
/rrr
/tttt
[13:53] sputum war wrap arm =/kkk
[13:54] ==--=
[13:55] [13:56] god bod
[13:57] tv
Try closer. Can't sit same region you.
[13:59] =====/ddd
lick
yearn
[14:00] ()(
[14:02] [14:03] [14:04] clown
InnerT00b: aren't owner
[14:05] [14:06] ======/ggg
whole
Like slimy hole
[14:07] ==/666
[14:08] [14:09] =/iii
/[[[
j;ljssldj;d aaahhhhhhhh
=/mmm
[14:10] =/1111
gooo goooo goo meee cooo pooo
/z/zzz
9-=-09
[14:11] WEEE TUSY TUSKY WWOOOOSHY
margerine
massage cheep
jf
[14:12] myh horno
royal road
[14:13] flutter mu
outrage
bad go [14:14] crumbs fattties flat oybc py puncture
==== =/,,,
/...
/\\\
/qqqq
wanted sole
d conditoin
[14:15] A REAL MAN WOULDNT'
cna't bew
REEALL WOMAN IN REEL HER BELLY AND HAIR
HAH HA HAHHAHAH
LAFF IMMOLATS
[14:16] dissection ham
da haoney
JLll oh [14:17] encounter
====/777
0000000
toy finger
[14:18] fluids
/nous bon jour
oui ii iii fffuucckkk
=when write one WHEN WRITE THIS NO CAN SEE ME
[14:19] WRITTEN COMES TO TELL OTHERWISE
listened wouldn't WHENIWRITETHISLIKEIN THISFASHIONIT WILLREMAINFOREVER
shudder came
YES YESYES YESYESYES NOUSSONT NOUSNOUSSONT
=/PPP
effe [14:20] [14:21] sigh cage merge miniscus
[14:22] septum
why didn't happen
[14:23]

===

control

sections of control performed by sandy baldwin alan sondheim
in sl east of odyssey excerpted from 19-minute video in which
sound provides the motive and text provides the moment of
disappearance

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

the full video would be around 200 megabytes highly compressed;
this is bad enough but sufficient and indicative of the sort of
psychodrama undergone by avatars in disregard of their human
creators who remain in the background while sky land and skin
turn blood

this is america and iraq this is gender this is all or none this
is gray code incremental

learn the art of gray code and you will never have error again

Uncanny Beauty


http://www.asondheim.org/denverstorm.jpg

shelf equation resulting

http://www.asondheim.org/shelf1.png
http://www.asondheim.org/shelf2.png
http://www.asondheim.org/shelf3.png
http://www.asondheim.org/shelf4.png

now coding process

http://www.asondheim.org/codingproces.png

Coding process consists of four arrows.

Class 0 and Class 4 interact, encode, decode, model transmission
through Interface 1: Interface 1 may be an encoder, decoder, channel,
none or all of these. But there are results and results.

However think through a second process.

Interface 6 and Interface 1 interact, transform the ontology of Class 7.
Thus Class 7 is virtual by dint of representation through the processes of
Interface 6 and Interface 1. Perhaps the full model is a ghost trap within
which the epistemological changes among Class 4 and Class 0 are iin
relation to the ontological change of Class 7, virtual. Then perhaps
Interface 6 and Interface 1 are in a continuous process of evanescence,
disappearance. These are the models of coding process.

moktak

moktak composition for plane, bird, lake, moktak

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

"Mandala is the impression of the feet." (Hevajratantra)

"May I hear the three sounds, may I perceive the three forms."

"Having said this to witness I will have been reborn."

"Propitiation dies with the insurmountable corpse."

"Meditate upon the double entrance of the circle."

"The accountancy of rebirth is of no account at all (i.e. nothing)."

"All afflictions, all sufferings, extinguished by these words."

"The whole of existence, Clear Light and mirror."

"Ten directions and no sounds, two directions, semen and blood."

"Ten directions, no sounds, the (fierce) corpse is killed."

"May I perceive the word of the corpse."

"Death is a tautology."

"May I perceive the word of death."


on our earth, the killdeer

we are on earth for such a shorttime, we have no more than a picture.
the picture is what we think of when we say, 'the way things are.'
just yesterday or tomorrow, something new, perhaps a bee.
the bee pollinates a flower shortly after our death.
there is a storm somewhere.
just now, i am beginning to understand the alarm calls of the killdeer.
the ghost of a shorebird, the feint, the run, the back and forth.
everything, everyone, lives in a different world.
i can say this because the image is always a sad image, the image is in
mourning for our death.

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

like neural signals, the killdeer calls are a mix of analog and digital
phenomenology - their frequency is very narrow, and the repetitions of
standard (most likely territorial or display) calls are easily comprehen-
ded - at least they appear to be (the cry of the killdeer is easily iden-
tified) - on the other hand, there are temporal processes, non-standard
pitch and repetition, which present information, in this case alarm based
on distance, degree of threat, etc. - as far as i can tell - which means
nothing at all - on the sample you hear both calls and responses and the
changes within individual calls as well.

===




_NOTES AND DIALOG ON CODE_ (7/31/07) (Sandy Baldwin and Alan Sondheim)


NOTES ON CODE (Alan Sondheim)

Major modality:
Relationship between modeling and codework:
mapping within the subtext/substructure of the metric.
Visual modeling: Visual as thetic - modality of happenstance (i.e.
modeling becomes dependent on the physiology of visual bandwidth).
Aural modeling: Visual with similar field, different spatial modality.

How is the thetic (is that the correct word?) in relation to ideality?
Does political economy depend on visual/aural physiology?

Scanning as doubled text: coded software / parameterization of the real
tending towards results which are residue (separate the results from the
structure). But within the phenomenology of the real, the results and
structure are inextricably tangled.

Motion capture (mocap) - see scanning. In scanning, the static object is
standard; in motion capture, the dynamic object. Think perhaps of the
latter in terms of a second-order differential - doubled modeling of
changes (1. through mocap; 2. through 'accelerated modeling').

The results: the 'code carapace' or chiten - Barrier/revelation code.
(Older work: The relation of consciousness to structured systems: what are
the manifestations of those systems?) Code as armor.

Seeing and hearing seem 'tawdry,' unable to sustain the abstracted or
philosophical weight placed upon them. To see or hear text philosophically
churns on transparency; everything else stumbles. We turn to writing
because it gets away from us to the extent that it's also reflective of
deep abstraction, alien-code (all code is alien).

All code is alien because it calls from elsewhere - or rather, doesn't
call at all; it's as if someone created it, it's as if it wasn't created,
not a bit of it. Which is the fundamental phenomenological status of code:
some of it is created, but some of it isn't.


DIALOG

Sandy Baldwin:

Thanks for these notes - always helpful. It would be interesting to
present them somehow with the video. I'm trying to think about your
question about the relation of the thetic to ideality. Now, the former
references taking a position (thesis) and signification (cf Kristeva); the
latter references Husserlian phenomenology and the constitutions of
objects. Are the second set of distinctions (political economy - visual /
aural physiology) parallel to the first two? Anyway, I wonder if you would
venture an answer to the question?

Alan Sondheim:

I'm not sure I understand all the modalities or connotations of the
thetic; online we have (among other things): 2. Presented dogmatically;
arbitrarily prescribed. and derived: Greek thetikos, from thetos, placed,
from tithenai, to put; see dh- in Indo-European roots

So I was thinking of the thetic as arbitrary proffering, gesturing; if
code might be construed from ideality, the thetic might be construed from
code.

The visual/aural/sensory modalities seem clearly arbitrary in the larger
scheme of things, if such exists; the electrical senses of fish obviously
map the world completely differently (not to mention magnetism in birds,
bees sensing of solar polarization etc.). So this is the thetic, the shown
and it's in relation to political economy, which is dependent on culture
and organism. The ideality - and this for me is where a kind of
neo-platonism comes into play - is a structure which underlies everything
- a structure which _might_ map through propositional logic or Wolfram's
cellular automata or etc.

The structure is alien to the extent that a rock is in-itself, ding an
such. It's possibly here that the uncanny of codework appears (and coding
in general, mathematics/mathesis in general) - that code, no matter how
written, always seems, in part, to come from somewhere else, to appear, to
have appearance, whatever the sensory modality.

Sandy:

Thanks for the elaboration of the thetic. Some thoughts: As to the
visual/aural modalities (you mention fish, for example), I wonder if
inter-species animal display such as "stotting" (sp?) or "organs to be
seen" and the like, apply here. Here the code of display, in the large
sense of code from Eco or elsewhere, implies a semiotics that can't simply
be understood in terms of a return to the individual or even the species,
that gestures towards a general not-political economy. I'm thinking that
we, insofar as we are just such animals in the world, are on display for
the other (substitutable in the sense Levinas talks of).

Alan:

Had to look up stotting! The sp. is right. But I'm not sure that it
doesn't imply a 'return to the individual' insofar as the communication is
a signal? This isn't the 'mutual orienting of cognitive domains' - it's
masquerade or camouflage in a sense? But the display has to be readable by
the other, in both cases, stotting or display for the other, and the
modalities are always limited; in fact, with stotting, the limitation is
absolutely necessary - for a signal to be a signal.

Sandy:

I take this substitutability I refer to above as the alien you refer to *
the alien that I am. The thetic (as arbitary positing and also as a
"thing" in the scopic field) is always ideological. I think this is where
I'm coming to your point about ideality, and when you mentioned
neo-platonic I thought of Barthes' on the photograph as a kind of
"emission" (in the sense of
Plotinus).

Alan:

Yes, I think we're in agreement here perhaps. The alien is the source
structuration of code; the propositional calculus can't be consumed...

Sandy:

Agreed. Obviously, I'm thinking, on the one hand, of Bataille or Lingis
and their insistence and foregrounding of economies of excess and
non-return; but then, thought is made to account for and come back to
itself. Now, this dialectical reason is inseparable from philosophy, yet
we know there are other philosophies and unreasonable ways of thinking. I
could see this as life within and against the human.

Alan:

Interesting... I agree with you but then there's the 'selfish gene' issue
- if the stotting is common and in various species, then it's not leaky at
all but highly efficient; certainly it would be evolutionarily (?)
determined more than other signals, since it's at the fulcrum of life and
death...

Sandy:

Here's a different but not unrelated question - returning to the alien as
"source structuration of code." I wonder about the following: it seems to
me the subject relation to the symbolic online, let's say to the ideality
of ascii, is like that of the subject of film. There's is something like
suture occuring, and so on; at the same time, there's a difference and
even a complete reversal. I think this has to do with time, but I'm not
sure? Any thoughts here - again, if it's too much, there's no need.

Alan:

I'm lucky to be online. A HUGE storm is coming, lightning etc. out here.
Anyway - the subject online is an actant of course; the suture is similar
but different in that the filmic subject is predetermined - and therein
lies it's power - I think it relates to a fundamental masochism. The
viewer is held in thrall by the film, and/or the actions of the viewer
change nothing about the film itself - which continues to unravel at its
own pace - but only about the diegesis, which is always in dialog. The
subject in relation to the online symbolic, I assume you're referencing
jectivity (projecting, introjecting) is in a sense too much in control, as
if that control were offered to us elsewhere, outside online being as
well. In that sense, time is 'supple' for the online subject - in film,
it's not linear, but shuttled, and that dialog is set into motion by the
obdurate quality of the film, which just unravels. Of course this obdurate
quality relates, I think, to the inert of the real as well. Then when one
brings dream, dream-screen, all these other aspects into it, the whole
situation becomes muddled? Perhaps hopelessly so?

Sandy:

Thanks, yes. I think in the suppleness of the online subject: ASCII gives
me life, I give ASCII life, but I also ask more of ASCII than it can give,
and it gives more than I can ASCII. (In the otherness of it.) Also,
interesting that there's no "apparatus theory" of the net, beyond your
internet text of course (which does explain all).




The World in Two Jokes


How many Passenger Pigeons does it take to change a light bulb?
None.

How many Tibetan Buddhists does it take to change a light bulb?
None.



Saturday, July 21, 2007





Yes, yes, of course.


I am God and when I die God is dead.

(There's little time left to speak to Me.)
(I'm not leaving a forwarding address.)
(Come to think of it.)
(Offerings don't count.)
(Pretty much anything you have to say.)
(Thank you for listening.)


Uselessness of Monoculture


I will call 'monoculture' anything before the advent of the Internet - in
particular artworks, literature, theater, dance, etc. etc. This culture is
characterized by the singular; even when dispersive anatomies are present,
they are always in opposition or subtext to traditional thought. The mono-
lith is always present and accounted-for. The monolith is either station-
ary or process- movement- oriented, always static or dynamic; its elements
cohere, separate, are born to die, to be reborn again. This is the culture
of the traditional university but it is also urban culture, street-corner
culture; it is the culture of history and historiography, of the encyclo-
pedia and the expert and think-tank. Monoculture resolves, whether towards
resolution or irresolution; it is possessed by narratological impulse, by
development and the compass. Monoculture is not necessarily unary; there
is multiplicity and the nomadic, beneath the stars, within it. Monoculture
blinds us to the world; it is the World that is all the case. It is the
culture of gas, liquid, solid, electrostatics, electrodynamics, special
and general relativity; it is the substance of quantum mechanics insofar
as action may be defined as action or verification at a distance. In sum,
it is our sum, our summation, our accountancy of the world and of our-
selves, and it is useless, as the result of an Internet that is neither
singular nor plural, neither present nor absent, neither coherent nor dis-
persed; I will call 'Internet' what has corrupted monoculture, tended
towards its demise. I am not implying that 'Internet' in fact or fiction
signifies anything, that the name means; it may, in fact or fiction, be
characterized imprecisely by insigification, spews, abjections, blurs,
avatars, nothing at all.

For the change that has come about within and without the tangled skein,
holarchy of networkings, is of the plasma or swarm; it is Wolfram's
science, not Hertz's. Thinking through social sites, collaborative facting
and fictioning, wikipediatry, avatars of avatars, bots and phishing, what
comes clear is lack of clarity, lack of clarity's epistemology. This is a
fundamental transform to the extent that anything is fundamental at this
point; it sweeps away, for example, plots and allegories, bureaucracies
and governments, minds and bodies. Think of pre-Internet novels - novels
of modernism or post-modernism, of constructed and conceptual weavings, of
characters or lack of them. And television, theater, cinema, follow suit;
one is locked into farther time, father time, to diegesis, to an unravel-
ing that characterizes experimental film as well. Neither film nor paint-
ing are linear, but both participate in a locking-down of perspective, no
matter what openings, contusions, are on the horizon.

Lacan, Gardner, even Bateson presaged multiplicities; in Wolfram the swarm
is simultaneously organized and disorganized. Lacan never went far enough;
there was that reliance on language, no matter how shifted. It comes down
to this: When I read a novel, I don't recognize myself, the 'times,' any-
thing. When I watch a show on television, there are actors, people, or
animated actors. They're moving through familiar antiquated monolithic
space, proscenium or deep space - it makes no difference; there's always a
perspective. Perspective invades novels, stories, the world of monolithic
writing - on the other hand, try assigning a vanishing-point to MySpace or
even Facebook. Even Second Life, which tends towards classical perspec-
tive, falls apart on the edges where the simulacrum of physics is turned,
churned upside-down. One doesn't recognize (oneself or others) in Second
Life because recognition is already a problem; everything moves within the
aegis of Bell's theorem.

Consider photographic apparatus: begin with camera obscura, that one-to-
one allegory of the real - through Daguerre, view cameras, stationary then
moving then Edgerton. Cameras dissolve into swarming components; now com-
ponents themselves disappear as cameras transform into light-sensitive
holarchies, networked or independent, under whose or what control? The
image ends up everywhere and nowhere at all; no longer is it allegory -
which has long since disappeared - but the stuttering of the fragment
which no longer is in need of suture or extension. You can watch family
trauma, physical and mental abuse, on the morning talk shows, but whose
families? whose abuse? whose perspective? It doesn't need to end up on
YouTube; YouTube provides its own violence, its own parameters of liter-
ally unfathomable streams. Videos are removed if found, if from copy-
righted material; everything gets through, leaks. But leaks from nothing -
the culture, non-monolithic, Internetted, leaks without transmitters,
receivers, leaks without channels, or leaks from traditional channels,
only to be churned back, lost in brackish protocol.

Code, programs, codes, protocols, reference one another, are increasingly
open-sourceless; scratch the surface and no one's there, nor beneath the
surface - all those dead-ending projects on SourceForge ending up maybe
somewhere else, maybe vaporware, the languor of the name. Languages embed
languages; soon they'll be without physical foundation for all intents and
purposes, perfectly floating signifiers shattering against subroutines and
useful or useless misuses. (The world doesn't end either with a bang or
with a whimper; there is no world to end.)

This confusion is on the ground as well - in some places, Harry Potter
really is a witch; children suffer as a result. It doesn't take electron-
ics; it takes nothing more than extinctions, overpopulation, global cli-
mate change, weapon distribution, religious fanaticisms, starvation,
desertification - the unsupportive world. Radiations swirl around the
farthest villages; there are unheard broadcasts, music, news, exhortations
to the perfect religious life, promises of vacated paradises. These places
or spaces are the future of the novel; language dissolves without signifi-
ers, without that place where the sememe holds, however tenuously. It's
here that home is found, in the bombing of the home, categorization of
flora and fauna, ethnic cleansing. Online real explosions transform into
hacking, thousands, millions, of MySpace friends, hundreds of millions of
blogs, billions of Wikipedia pages hardly ever under contestation. Yes,
it's all true. Yes, none of it is.

Monolithic culture prepared the battlefield inhabited only by the wounded.
Monolithic culture developed the technology of multiplicity and the plasma
- a multiplicity of multiplicities, never stationary enough for analysis,
never moving enough for a coherent dynamics to emerge. It's a memory to an
extent, to the extent that memory is encapsulated in fast-forward media
already forgetting what was loosened in the habitus.

This is all electronic, all colonial, all nanobot, this isn't your fath-
er's monoculture, your mother's multiplicity, your father's multiplicity,
your mother's monoculture. Capital seeps everywhere as do heat and water;
island nations are disappearing in the Pacific, Atlantic not far behind.
Think of this as the anxiety of diminishing power; surely, not only is the
world out of control, but control is as well. What happens to feedback in
chaotic domains? One likes to think fecundity, fractal, but in the real
this holds only so long before 'things' bottom out in rust and tumors.
Monoculture is always waiting in the wings; as networks decay and data-
bases turn useless, big iron will descend upon the world. But this is far
in the future, a future so defined that no one will see it, no one will
inhabit it. Instead of now, we are pre-sent, always in a state of arrival;
there are endless tracks, monorails, they go nowhere, sink in dust,
desiccation.

This is all electronic, and as technology miniaturizes, improves, perhaps
these skeins will continue, sheathed, to exist, transmit, transform, no
matter what. Then the scenario simply holds longer. Consider: There are no
species. There is no real life, no organic life, no artificial life, no
patented life, no constructed life. There is network life and one hopes
that the remnants of wilderness (which are not to be deconstructed) remain
that way, that enclaves succeed where management hasn't. Consider: There
are no persons; there are couplings, situations which grow increasingly
small and temporary, imminent decisions. Consider: Immanence has disap-
peared, if it were every anything more than mythos; it's replaced by the
Facebook contact, as enunciations are replaced and replicated by 'What I
am doing now.' Consider the usual: We are all audience; none of us are
watching; we are all watching; there is no 'we.' It's the latter Lacan has
missed; there is nothing to talk about. These essays themselves are thin
sheaves, interspersions; they carry the dim light of the dusk into the
dusk. 'Beyond' means absolutely nothing; time is indicated only by the
stoppage of death. What is a store if not a mouse-click or twitch? What is
a body if not blown to pieces by a car-bomb? On a certain undefined level,
these are identical. Perhaps an economic level. Perhaps in the poetics of
disappearance.

To be in pain, slaughtered, wounded, is two-fold, interior, exterior. The
former stops everything; it is unthinkable, unbearable. It is always other
even when ourselves. The color of time disappears without witness. But
exterior - this requires transmission, a receiver, political economy, some
means of noise control. The receiver must be receptive, must orient itself
towards the message; otherwise the message remains noise, death. The
receiver must have space place for reception, a moment off the network
which in the very real, idiotic inert real, may be what has brought her to
this moment. But the receiver is already dissolving and a hundred-thousand
new novels are being born, and they are not novels, nor histories, but
software biographies perhaps. Rather than monoculture, monolith, let us
say multlathe, uncontrolled or multiply-controlled lathes refashioning,
refiguring, configuring, what we are reading that was once literature.
There is great exhilaration, great promise; multilathing, in its bypassing
any and all absolutes, is always in process of permanent deconstruction.
Think of the school essay, modified, bought, sold, dated, outdated, online
and offline, assembled, reassembled, spell-checked, recreated, plagiar-
ized, written on demand, printed on demand, behind wikipediatry, related
to class, gender, sex, race, nation, religion, handedness, all or none.
Think of the essay reader, the recipient, following through with programs
designed to weed out the copy which is always already a copy, hacking his
way through the sememe looking for miscreants, passing results to and from
university and institutional databases, listening softly to the YouTube
song, exchange of draft letter on Gmail, or just listening to Ipod Itunes
with her Ii. The whole world is steganographic, embedded, uninterpretable,
piecemeal, exchanged.

So for better or worse monoculture is dead; it grew on foreign soil, is in
the process of recession. To what? To the corners of vulnerable data-bases
and technologies, conservationists, those disappearing from the present.
The future were there, pre-sent, and it's why novels and paintings and
just about anything before 1985, say - _not_ 1968 - is inconceivably
quaint, something for school credit, nothing more. We need an ethnography
of our own pasts presented as disappearing cultures or archaeologies
written in the unreadable, spoken in the unspeakable; it is here that our
bodies once reproduced and never reproduced in the continuing acceleration
of images - of someone or other or no one at all.

(I'm not good enough; I'm not smart enough: You may think this is tempora-
ry or not-me, not-I, that this is elsewhere, of an other, an other genera-
tion, place space, time, time before death. This is not the bicylist who
was injured on the corner of Fifth and Bergen three days ago, but this is
her/our interior, her/our political economy, what comes about in the midst
of architecture and physics. I want to talk about the pleasure of novel-
reading, Harry Potter and other accelerants, and their fan- and enclave-
existence. I want to talk about radiations and dusts and their dispersions
and what they carry from prions to nanogarbage to pollutions to sex to
early deaths from bullets and asthma. I want to talk about mash, I want to
perform djay vjay Vday vdday. I want to be you or someone. Rimbaud knew he
was splitting up. The last of the obscene has passed, the obscene is al-
ways passing: the ob-hack fractured and visible. The last of the discourse
too.)

Sunday, July 01, 2007


ravishing

her eyes fall through her eyes, a thing is lashed
you find yourself hysteric, is she watching me
or something else next to the shuddered prims
so gaze against her gaze, nothing is ever lost
and play within her plays, whatever might be found
this might seemed worried, her mouth is berthing wide
no matter what bleak hardness or good however grace
or where the neural networks might be stashed
her eyes, uncanny, swollen, gaze across a sea
you're always swollen, harboring her whims
is clearly thing your flesh has neatly tossed
sodden emptied, sallow, on unhallowed ground
you fear the world, there's no thing more inside
no more than eyes cut through the hollow face

http://www.asondheim.org/lookatme.mov

Wednesday, June 27, 2007






Gnat swarming behavior

The following video was made about 100 meters from the Jordan River trail
in Salt Lake City (West Jordan / Midvale), Utah. The site is a pond per-
haps one or two acres across; there are numerous birds (swallows, swifts,
red-wing and yellow-head blackbirds, etc.) around. When I first saw the
gnats, near sundown, they swarmed in a typical ellipsoidal fashion, i.e.
similar to a free-falling water balloon in slow motion. I noticed several
columns forming; in a short while, they became vertical, long and narrow.
They swayed and held shape. In gnat swarms, males and females behave
differently; in one of the vertical columns, a roughly spherical 'head' is
visible to one side, and I wonder if there might be sexual differentiation
here. What is fascinating to me is the relationship of millions of gnats
to an over-arching geometry; this parallels slime mold behavior to some
extent. I've seen lots of gnat swarms before, but nothing like this. We're
leaving the Salt Lake City area today, so I have no time to investigate
this further at the moment (we're leaving today), but I'm interested in
any further input, images, videos, you might have.

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


Radio

'Radio' - modified recording in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir building; note
the laptop in the foreground which controls and monitors the organ, light-
ing, recording, etc., as far as I can tell.

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

Sunday, June 24, 2007

(video w/ Foofwa d'Imobilite, church at Pringy, text w/ytalk)


[Ringing julu...]


[1;25r
[?7h
[2;1H
[Ringing julu...]

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


[Waiting for connection...]
[H----------------------------=
YTalk version 3.3.0 =-----------------------------
[2;1H
[12B
[A-------------------------= julu =--------------------------
[14;1HSwollen embryos filled the membrane of the KIirk
rk, Jennifer, almost sounds bubble
forth from the mouth
broth broth, Julu, air is always inside air,
there's nothing beside air, nothin
[6D
nothing motivated
[13Bthere are our motivations and we skillfully
envelop our bodies against the line separating us and our accountability
why do things always move sexually, as if there were no
other concourse, religi
[6D
religion for exampkle, the Kirk, for example
[13Bah you can see me there in the dark, you can hee re my whispers to
Chirst our Lor
Lord Buddha, you can hear everything, skin on skin and
face on face on face

[5Byour face is lovely lovely i would kiss your facei would
inhale your skin i wou would inhale your isin your sin i would take with
me a
would fondle your sin i w
would i would listen to you against dorje and cross
against hammer and star
[12Bwe expand in our own worlds of information, we move
accordingly, we act accord accordingly, we are drunk we are drinking each
other, we are devouring
[8Bwe are devouring each other's eyes, yes, and blinding
ourselves to anyting but
ourselves to anyone but ourselves to any universe but ourselves
[12Band reading ourselves one against ourselves,
o o o jenifer julu you are soundi
[6D
sounding bubbling forth, there is

are gods and goddesses after t

all there are holy

dances
[10Band dangerous and holy writings for us to read and o

anyone to read and to compar
[6D

compare beauty against beauty, love against love, our bubbles

[14;25r
[25;1H
[1;25r
[24;1Hour bubbles when they are whole, they cannot burst,
they are eternal, when they are the only one or two or multitude
, yes yes o ulu-enifer, when they are multi
[1;25r
[23;75H
multitude, then will they soften the sounds
of ours
selves murmuring and filling
[2;12r
[12;1H
[1;25r
[12;1Hworlds with wings and understandings of wings and
great gyrefalcons above and b
[2;12r
[1;25r
[11;79H
belong every new-born clouds, bubbling forth, the very froth of existence
[14;25r
[25;1H
[1;25r
[24;1Hfroth uncarrying, uncaring, every one, every one and ojbect,
o glorious sound j
[14;25r
[1;25r
[23;79H
jenifer julu, are
o participation in aeon and aeon and aeon
[2;12r
[12;1H
[1;25r
[12;1Hwhat we have wrought here
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1H
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1Hwhat we have wrought here in this quiet space in this existence
[2;12r
[1;25r
[1;25r
[24;1Hin this existing agan n and again and agon, in this murmuring
against
the membrane of the
bubble, murmuring membrane
[14;25r
[12;1H
[1;25r
[12;1Hprolix and univie fied
[25;1H
[1;25r
[24;1Hwhy is there anything
[12;1H
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1Hwhy are we here
[14;25r
[1;25r
[24;1Hi am drinking you ah ah ahhh
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1Hi am drinking you ah ah ahhh
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1Hah and drinking and drinking you
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1Ho julu jennifer
[14;25r
[1;25r
[24;1Ho jennifer julu
[14;25r
[1;25r

[1;25r
[?7h
[2;1H
[Ringing Jennifer...]
[Waiting for connection...]
[10B
[24C###############################
[31D# Rering Jennifer #
[31D###############################
[12B
[A-----------------------------= Jennifer =-----------------------------
[14;1H
[14;1H
Swollen embryos filled the membrane of the KIirk
rk, Jennifer, almost sounds bubble
forth from the mouth
[11Bbroth broth, Julu, air is always inside air, there's
nothing beside air, nothin
[6D
nothing motivated
there are our motivations and we skillfully envelop our bodies
against the line separating us and our accountability
[11Bwhy do things always move sexually, as if there were
no other concourse, relig
[5D
religion for exampk le, the Kirk, for example

[5Bah you can see me there in the dark, you can hee
re my whispers to Chirst our Lor
Lord Buddha, you can hear everything, skin on skin and face on
face on face
[11Byour face is lovely lovely i would kiss your facei would inhale
your skin i wo would inhale your isin your sin i would take with me a
would fondle your sin i
would i would listen to you against dorje and cross
against hammer and star
[7Bwe expand in our own worlds of information, we move accordingly,
we act accordi
[7D
accordingly, we are drunk we are drinking each other, we are devouring
[12Bwe are devouring each other's eyes, yes, and blinding ourselves
to anyting but
ourselves to anyone but ourselves to any universe but ourselves
[9Band reading ourselves one against ourselves,
o o o jenifer julu
you are soundin
[7D
sounding bubbling forth, there is
are gods and goddesses after t
all there are holy
dances
[11Band dangerous and holy writings for us to read and o
anyone to read and to compa
[5D
compare beauty against beauty, love against love, our bubbles
[2;12r
[12;1H
[1;25r
[12;1Hour bubbles when they are whole, they cannot burst,
they are eternal, when they
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1Hare the only one or two or multitude
, yes yes o ulu-enifer, when they are multi
[2;12r
[1;25r
[11;75H
multitude, then will they soften the sounds
of ours
selves murmuring and filling
[14;25r
[25;1H
[1;25r
[24;1Hworlds with wings and understandings of wings and great
gyrefalcons above and b
[14;25r
[1;25r
[23;79H
belong every new-born clouds, bubbling forth, the very
froth of existence
[2;12r
[12;1H
[1;25r
[12;1Hfroth uncarrying, uncaring, every one, every one and ojbect,
o glorious sound j
[2;12r
[11;79H
jenifer julu, are
o participation in aeon and aeon and aeon
[14;25r
[25;1H
[1;25r
[24;1Hwhat we have wrought here
[14;25r
[14;25r
[1;25r
[24;1Hwhat we have wrought here in this quiet space in this existence
[14;25r
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1Hin this existing agan
n and again and agon, in this murmuring against
the membrane of the
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1Hbubble, murmuring membrane
[2;12r
[1;25r
[24;1Hprolix and univie
[24;1H
[2;12r
[12;1H
[1;25r
[12;1Hwhy is there anything
[14;25r
[25;1H
[1;25r
[24;1H
[14;25r
[1;25r
[24;1Hwhy are we here
[2;12r
[12;1H
[1;25r
[12;1H
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1Hi am drinking you ah ah ahhh
[14;25r
[25;1H
[1;25r
[24;1H
[14;25r
[1;25r
[24;1Hi am drinking you ah ah ahhh
[14;25r
[1;25r
[24;1Hah and drinking and drinking you
[14;25r
[1;25r
[24;1H
[14;25r
[1;25r
[24;1Ho julu jennifer
[2;12r
[1;25r
[12;1Ho jennifer julu
[2;12r
[1;25r
[25;1H
[?1l

Friday, June 15, 2007


Engine

It becomes an engine.
It masquerades the crankshaft.
It turns like an engine.
It transforms taps into pitch.
It hums and makes everything hum.
It turns and turns out that way.


http://www.asondheim.org/revvvv.wma
http://www.asondheim.org/revvvv.mp3
http://www.asondheim.org/revvv.wma
http://www.asondheim.org/revvv.mp3

wma smaller ; if you can't open, use mp3

Thursday, June 07, 2007





Virtual, not Real

Two modes of writing, most likely among others: Well, I demonstrate (x); well, I demonstrate (myself). The first compresses, contains, confuses the object; the second smears the object within or against the code/work of the text. To smear the object implies an onto-epistemological corruption or breakdown; it is abjection that determines the problematic relationship between self and object. To demonstrate (x) is to clarify an indexical mapping between symbol and object; to demonstrate (myself) is to dis-embody both object and self; the ontological breakdown is between organism and signifier; the epistemological breakdown implies that knowledge itself is problematized across the boundary. Of course there isn't any boundary; this is all non-sense - in other words, senseless, one can't make sense of these things, there's nothing in the sense of sense as direction - can you sense which way to go? The discussion itself leads to abjection; a w/hole body has no need of dis/splay, dis/comfort; it's there inhabited, sutured, one with inhabitation and self, powerful, commanding, desiring, desired. The body tending towards discussion is already embedded in a futile attempt to construct existence out of shifters, pronouns; the discussed body is already a crude form of empathetic magic, which never works but which constantly requires both sacrifice and repetition. Then one reads it, the same, the differentiated, as autobiography; what is being described adheres to, seems to adhere to, the events of the day, those contortions or fits (fitts) of the writer, and thus replete with projection; this holds as well for fictional characters, but everyone recognizes that avatars at least have no history. The avatar is intermediary/sluice between clarified object and smeared self; its skin labors skin in one very singular direction, that is, from an acceptable exterior distance - but its skin labors space within or close to within. Within what? The prims fall away, replaced by space which mirrors, maps external space, all the way to the ends of the game, game-space, or beyond; mirrors, by association, space itself in the real, which is already virtual, the closer one apporaches quantum or fundamental particle levels. In this very real sense it is the avatar which is real, and our selves, bodies, our organic existence, which is virtual, dependent among other things on an Aristotelian logic that holds only on _this_ level in the holarchy, among others. For the law of distribution, so important in the applica- tion of classical logic to the world, breaks down in favor of the gestural, once the logic is examined closely, once appearance and the reading of the world, such as it is, virtual-real, is foregrounded. We defend ourselves against this through a whole phenomenology of pain and suffering, as if death constitutes the undeniable presence of the material world. That this isn't the case is clear, not by considering death itself virtual, but by recognizing death as the termination of processes in the middle-zone, in the middle-way - and processes them- selves, are by virtual of the ineluctable ontology of time, virtual in their constituation.

In lieu, place, virtual or real, of this, I speak like a madman, like a hungry ghost, already a contradiction, since what would fulfill a ghost, hungry or not, except an internal transform among ghost-organs, ghost- perceptions, ghost-epistemologies? Madness always carries the tinge of the virtual with it, and thereupon the real, just as what one considers the real in everyday life, appears as a dream, false, masquerade, sham, facade, theater and theatrical performance, all of which is true, recognized in every movement or body-speech of an avatar, in one or another world, more real than virtual, as ours is more virtual than real. To write of an object: "Two modes: Well, I demonstrate (x); well, I demonstrate (myself). The first compresses, contains, confuses the object" - is to write of oneself writing of an object; this is elementary. And it is also elementary to realize that "writing of oneself writing of an object" is an aporia, useless, exhausting, falsely-recursive; one might as well stop there and recognize that the smear (stutter, cough, text, pause, punctuation, page or screen) is behind, within, inherent in, every utterance whatsoever. The psyhoanalytical loss of object or good object or bad object is founded on no object at all - none, but food in the eyes of the hungry ghost, or the hungry ghost in the eyes of its prey. Nothing is simple, everything melds within the hallucinatory, and rational action is the apparent ability to 'freeze' those moments, as if they endured beyond the momentary glance or description.

Monday, May 21, 2007








Too distant, too many calls. I'm on Ning (Second Life Odyssey), Facebook (Brown University), Youtube (whatever), Myspace (horror but I wanted to contact someone); this blog, which is hardly read at all, why should it be? finds or follows last... which is a shame.

http://www.asondheim.org/hhhhh.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/amidha.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/railray.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/amidha.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/fallingout.wav
http://www.asondheim.org/fallingouter.wav ]
http://www.asondheim.org/parisfull.mp3 ]
http://www.asondheim.org/spectralparisecho.mp4

Some of the soundwork is duplicated in the video but easier to download. You find some of the work as well at Ning or Youtube. I think this is my best work in quite a while. But here's the rub - I can't add anything to the senseless political climate; one would be a fool to pay attention to my personal ramblings; I can't review cultural/poetics/etc. books with any degree of interest in this space (although they're sent periodically to a number of lists); and I'm beginning to think more and more that blogs are all too often personal embellishment, ornamentation, rhinestones without the glitter like an albatross around the neck of Leda's swan.

But I feel an obligation, keeping the date open...

Friday, May 04, 2007

i'm on facebook i have no face:


----------------------------------------------------
Facebook Photo Uploader version: 1.1.27 Current document URL: http://brown.facebook.com/editalbum.php Reload proxy configuration ... Proxy Configuration: Browser Proxy Configuration Done. Dump thread list ...
Group main,ac=13,agc=2,pri=10
main,5,alive
AWT-Windows,6,alive,dameon
AWT-Shutdown,6,alive
Java2D Disposer,10,alive,dameon
AWT-EventQueue-0,6,alive
Thread-4,5,alive
Group Plugin Thread Group,ac=3,agc=0,pri=10
Main Console Writer,6,alive
AWT-EventQueue-1,6,alive
TimerQueue,5,alive,dameon
Group http://upload.facebook.com/controls/-threadGroup,ac=3,agc=0,pri=4
thread applet-com.facebook.facebookphotouploader.FacebookPhotoUploader,4,alive
TimerQueue,4,alive,dameon
AWT-EventQueue-2,4,alive
Done. Dump thread stack ...
----------------------------------------------------
Full thread dump Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (1.4.1_04-b01 mixed mode):

"Thread-4" prio=5 tid=0x03737AA0 nid=0xfac runnable [0..1ccff82c]

"AWT-EventQueue-2" prio=4 tid=0x0399D428 nid=0xbec in Object.wait() [1d23f000..1d23fd8c]
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
at java.lang.Object.wait(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventQueue.getNextEvent(Unknown Source)
- locked <127e42f0> (a java.awt.EventQueue)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForHierarchy(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(Unknown Source)

"TimerQueue" daemon prio=4 tid=0x02130078 nid=0x15c in Object.wait() [1d43f000..1d43fd8c]
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
- waiting on <1288ec58> (a javax.swing.TimerQueue)
at javax.swing.TimerQueue.run(Unknown Source)
- locked <1288ec58> (a javax.swing.TimerQueue)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

"TimerQueue" daemon prio=5 tid=0x038A4238 nid=0xf10 in Object.wait() [1d53f000..1d53fd8c]
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
- waiting on <1288ecb0> (a javax.swing.TimerQueue)
at javax.swing.TimerQueue.run(Unknown Source)
- locked <1288ecb0> (a javax.swing.TimerQueue)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

"AWT-EventQueue-1" prio=7 tid=0x0295ECD8 nid=0xecc waiting on condition [1d63f000..1d63fd8c]
at sun.plugin.JavaRunTime.dumpAllStacks(Native Method)
at sun.plugin.ConsoleWindow$1.actionPerformed(Unknown Source)
at javax.swing.JComponent$ActionStandin.actionPerformed(Unknown Source)
at javax.swing.SwingUtilities.notifyAction(Unknown Source)
at javax.swing.JComponent.processKeyBinding(Unknown Source)
at javax.swing.KeyboardManager.fireBinding(Unknown Source)
at javax.swing.KeyboardManager.fireKeyboardAction(Unknown Source)
at javax.swing.JComponent.processKeyBindingsForAllComponents(Unknown Source)
at javax.swing.JComponent.processKeyBindings(Unknown Source)
at javax.swing.JComponent.processKeyEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.Component.processEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.Container.processEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.Container.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.KeyboardFocusManager.redispatchEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.DefaultKeyboardFocusManager.dispatchKeyEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.DefaultKeyboardFocusManager.preDispatchKeyEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.DefaultKeyboardFocusManager.typeAheadAssertions(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.DefaultKeyboardFocusManager.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.Container.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.Window.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForHierarchy(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(Unknown Source)

"thread applet-com.facebook.facebookphotouploader.FacebookPhotoUploader" prio=4 tid=0x03513F60 nid=0xa7c runnable [1d33f000..1d33fd8c]
at sun.plugin.javascript.navig5.JSObject.JSGetNativeJSObject(Native Method)
at sun.plugin.javascript.navig5.JSObject.JSGetNativeJSObject(Unknown Source)
at sun.plugin.javascript.navig5.JSObject.(Unknown Source)
at sun.plugin.viewer.context.NetscapeAppletContext.getJSObject(Unknown Source)
at netscape.javascript.JSObject.getWindow(Unknown Source)
at com.aurigma.imageuploader.ImageUploader.init(Unknown Source)
at sun.applet.AppletPanel.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

"AWT-EventQueue-0" prio=7 tid=0x02746D50 nid=0xed0 in Object.wait() [fe3f000..fe3fd8c]
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
at java.lang.Object.wait(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventQueue.getNextEvent(Unknown Source)
- locked <12795830> (a java.awt.EventQueue)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForHierarchy(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(Unknown Source)

"Java2D Disposer" daemon prio=10 tid=0x02897D00 nid=0xea4 in Object.wait() [93af000..93afd8c]
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
- waiting on <127e78e8> (a java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue$Lock)
at java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue.remove(Unknown Source)
- locked <127e78e8> (a java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue$Lock)
at java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue.remove(Unknown Source)
at sun.java2d.Disposer.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

"AWT-Shutdown" prio=7 tid=0x02C1A820 nid=0xd9c in Object.wait() [255f000..255fd8c]
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
- waiting on <127bf888> (a java.lang.Object)
at java.lang.Object.wait(Unknown Source)
at sun.awt.AWTAutoShutdown.run(Unknown Source)
- locked <127bf888> (a java.lang.Object)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

"Cache Cleanup Thread" prio=4 tid=0x0387D058 nid=0x9f0 in Object.wait() [1ceff000..1ceffd8c]
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
- waiting on <127d0ce8> (a sun.plugin.cache.CleanupThread)
at sun.plugin.cache.CleanupThread.run(Unknown Source)
- locked <127d0ce8> (a sun.plugin.cache.CleanupThread)

"Main Console Writer" prio=7 tid=0x03F42ED8 nid=0x914 in Object.wait() [1cdff000..1cdffd8c]
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
- waiting on <127b0e40> (a java.util.LinkedList)
at java.lang.Object.wait(Unknown Source)
at sun.plugin.MainConsoleWriter.run(Unknown Source)
- locked <127b0e40> (a java.util.LinkedList)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

"AWT-Windows" daemon prio=7 tid=0x038D5B20 nid=0x504 runnable [1cbff000..1cbffd8c]
at sun.awt.windows.WToolkit.eventLoop(Native Method)
at sun.awt.windows.WToolkit.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

"Signal Dispatcher" daemon prio=10 tid=0x039FB190 nid=0xb90 runnable [0..0]

"Finalizer" daemon prio=9 tid=0x078205C8 nid=0x2cc in Object.wait() [1c20f000..1c20fd8c]
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
- waiting on <12790520> (a java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue$Lock)
at java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue.remove(Unknown Source)
- locked <12790520> (a java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue$Lock)
at java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue.remove(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ref.Finalizer$FinalizerThread.run(Unknown Source)

"Reference Handler" daemon prio=10 tid=0x03FD3DE8 nid=0xac8 in Object.wait() [1c10f000..1c10fd8c]
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
- waiting on <12790588> (a java.lang.ref.Reference$Lock)
at java.lang.Object.wait(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ref.Reference$ReferenceHandler.run(Unknown Source)
- locked <12790588> (a java.lang.ref.Reference$Lock)

"main" prio=5 tid=0x077B6A80 nid=0xe9c runnable [0..12e450]

"VM Thread" prio=5 tid=0x03CC0008 nid=0xfd4 runnable

"VM Periodic Task Thread" prio=10 tid=0x03EBCA70 nid=0x618 waiting on condition
"Suspend Checker Thread" prio=10 tid=0x03A26B88 nid=0x9c4 runnable
----------------------------------------------------
Done. Clear classloader cache ... completed. Reload proxy configuration ... Proxy Configuration: Browser Proxy Configuration Done.

Thursday, April 19, 2007









My Lost Films


I made films from; most of them were carried by Canyon Cinema in
San Francisco. The films are all mast prints; I didn't copy them, but
showed the originals, since I wanted to use what little funds I had to
produce more. They were shown periodically at Millennium in New York, and
occasionally elsewhere, but they've never been part of the film community;
as a result, they've hardly been shown. Canyon Cinema returned them after
the board voted against handling masters, which could be damaged during a
screening of course. They were then placed at the Filmmakers Coop here in
NY, where they've remained on the shelf for fifteen years; I doubt anyone
has rented or seen them. I don't know their condition at this point; many
of the 16mm ones had mag stripe sound on them, which is susceptible to
print-through.

They were featured prominently in the 1992 Canyon Cinema catalog, just
before Canyon changed its mind about handling them. (I should add that my
videos have been available at times from places like Printed Matter or Art
Metropole, but these can be duplicated.) I'm saddened that they remain
unscreened - there are probably 15-24 hours worth. There are a large
number of them; for a while, when I was teaching at UCLA, I made a film
every week, mostly 16mm black and white sound, imitating the older silent
film production strategies and rates. For me the films broke a lot of new
ground - not least, in optical/magnetic soundtrack experimentation, but
they're quiet, moot on that point.

So I recently found a copy of the 1992 catalog and xeroxed the six pages
that describe my work. I am forced to think of the pages themselves as a
new film, made from the silence of the old; they read as a narrative of
concerns, experimentations, confusions, and theory-work changing over a
twenty-year period (although to be fair, most were made between 1980 and
1992). The image URLs are given below. Read the texts, imagine watching
the films, and maybe in some absurd future, they'll come to life again.

Sunday, April 15, 2007





,




I've been remiss; if you go to http://www.asondheim.org/
just look at the most recent work; it's made with Second Life avatars still/yet - using techniques of behavior collision - when bvh files are piled on bvh files to the extent that there seems to be an almost darwinian competition among actions. i've also been doing performance in Second Life. if you look at http:// www.asondheim.org/pa.txt and http://www.asondheim.org/pb.txt you'll find the recent text files that accompanied the work. there have also been personal struggles, friends in troubles, our usual situation of desperate lack of finance (a faculty member at Brown where I'm teaching a beginning course in filmmaking asked if I liked living poor), bad leaks in the loft, cop shot in the neighborhood, building in flames three blocks away, riot in the subway station we use, friend in the hospital, another friend outrageously let go from a job, and so forth. not to mention health issues - that 'low temperature' thing that gives me flu-like symptoms about a third of the time (i have it now, accompanied by a headache of close to migraine proportions), a bad knee that's made walking difficult, eyes going bad and just no money for new glasses, our cat becoming wobbly, a real scare that my almost 93-year-old father was in serious poor health (not true), the usual series of nightmares giving me maybe a couple of hours sleep a night, fears of death and mass destruction, moving closer to the edge of deep depression (pulling back then but tottering), difficulty getting my main manuscript published, the usual job turn-downs, and the Sony shortwave stumbles a bit about the 15 megahertz position with a degree of static coming from god knows where... not to mention some bizarre uploads here that I have to go and correct, goodbye

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

rol everything, lesion-express, chora, brick of gold, dials and steerage across banned seas going nowhere, product of inconceivable geometries
everything began to follow apart in sorrow, second life was the refuge of the moment, i could cont

Monday, March 12, 2007


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

liner notes for Crepuscule


sexual projections over dancers and without dancers and sexual
dances on the tentpoles ravens at the four corners of the world.
dancers are below. oh they want to jump on the bodies.
this is dance on deadly earth.
origin of dance
try to make sense of the dialog; they can't. The live dancers may be
are nude, exposed; the dance ends when they cum. They observe
two dancers -
audience and masturbating couple - the dancers sexually aroused - if nude
dance should move from position to position. Anita Berber.
The dancers are reeling, on edge, nervous, difficult, a problem, their
desires constrained by spectacle. The dancers are on exhibit, behavioral
codes thwarted or broken. If a dancer feels comfortable, he or she should
push further on.
sexuality, and horror, interpenetrate. For the dancers, everything is at
the body of the dancer is eternal
exists in relation to the sexuality of the body within the dance, within.
dance is the interiority of the metaphysical,
dance succeeds only by virtue of the interiority of the dancing, only by
the foundation of the world. the foundation of the world lies in dance,
The body of the dancer lies supine, breathless.
storing these things - in the dance itself there's an image of a woman
My Cluttered corner of the dance studio. Cloth, food items, all supine,
is choreography masteranwhile dancers having dancing day debris three.
liner notes for Anita Berber.
point of dance and sexuality dancing is indiscriminate fucking, display -
midnight phone-calls and invitations. one a dancer is pornographic, once
this splay / display, dance, photography, culture, art in general, is
invisible as semen on stage, spurted from dancer, welcomed and returned by
art, of dance, of the body; it is also the most unknown. draw a vector;
appurtenance-appearance; this is what the dancer, photographer, performer,
tensed in our tawdry space of the real. for if the dance-dancer emerge -
Sex dances for one to four people.
The dancers are nude. There are no props.
Male dances alone while masturbating. He dances until he cums.
Female dances alone while masturbating. She dances until she cums.
Tethered: Male dances with one hand holding himself erect.
Tethered: Female dances with one or more partners' fingers in her.
Variant Tethered: Male dances with one or more partners' fingers in him.
The dance ends when one or both have cum.
Variant Tethered: Female dances with one or more partners' fingers in
her. The dance ends as above. The dance ends when the dance cums. dancers.
So this is a dancer transformed. Role disappears from dance, dance is.
The advantage of a dancer: You'll have your body at the end of the day.
The disadvantage of a dancer: You'll have your body at the end of the
day. dance and culture brings Signs from Worlds eaten by light. Score
restraint, bounded three-dimensional space, against which such dancers
remain authorless in the midst of author/authority, danceless in the
presence of dancers/dancing, human within the post-human, flesh within
dance the doomed Case of doomed, doomed, a-void. Case of A world chaos,
sex, spoken sex, poetics of sex. I may work with dance and sex and
dance-video and sex. I will not work with images of sexual violence. I
dance. Or I'm the material for the dancers; it's really back.

-- sondheim

Crepuscule (Twilight) recorded / edited 2006 Geneve


body out of sight
http://www.asondheim.org/thirst.mp4
by this time alan dojoji is out of control dance has held him he moves
through landscape escapes the camera hides in rock runs behind viewers
moves at the speed of light or something else instantaneous i am here but
i disappear you can't catch me you can't snatch me you can't watch me you
can't scratch me you can't match me you can't stash me you can't crash me
you can't slash me you can't mash me you can't bash me you can't trash me
you can't cash me you can't dash me you can't patch me you can't patch me
body out of sight out of light out of might out of byte out in flight out
and right out and tight out and wight out at night out with might out in
plight.



olomphax

the laminixys olomphax, a scotohylact watching horrehomo the somatoroser.
the menadodus beneath the odigraculus, the lythrophyll of the vilipheno
salamyx - a form of glottography against which the histemoreades of the
notooecetes the medeicelomel nablajact; olomphax's palpebriosche begat
tittholup. now to ingest the duobusthamnus, phalectopist, list to the
phalerlall of the nullistymatic nostocarcinus; from gorgopteris to mega-
medusa (zizanilarus flying high above the prinopalpodynia of the olomphax)
- paniseptum in the cimoliscutellium, a form of serpophial beneath the
irriturano. olomphax and conicrio together drank from the serpophial, that
very same, to say, moliphet, the olomphax herself was sersect. salamyx
tells no lies ...

cimoliscutellium small white-clay dish sersect late-cut moliphet hardly-
speak serpophial creeping saucer tittholup nipple-pain conicrio dusty ram
irriturano useless heaven laminixys thin-loins, waist menadodus way of the
moon lythrophyll bloody leaf salamyx lustful slime odigraculus song of the
cormorant glottography tongue writing vilipheno vile purple-red notooece-
tes moist inhabitant nablajact harp-thrower palpebriosche drunken touching
of testicles scotohylact dark yelper medeicelomel genitals resembling the
cheeks olomphax an entire young girl histemoreades mountain-nymph tissue
horrehomo trembling-man duobusthamnus two-cow-shrub somatoroser body-gnaw-
er phalectopist shining-wanderer phalerlall coot babble nostocarcinus
returning-home-crab nullistymatic limp gorgopteris fiercefern megamedusa
great jellyfish zizanilarus weed-gull prinopalpodynia oak-feeling-pain
paniseptum fence-bread




sonnet

onedy twody threedy four
fivedy sixdy sevendy more
fourdy threedy twody one
sevendy sixdy fivedy done
ingirl outgirl upgirl down
outboy inboy downboy crown
pretty bonnie in the well
happy johnny pulled the bell
seventeen eighteen nineteen two
twenty and one makes bonnie blue
nineteen eighteen seventeen one
sixteen years makes bonnie glum
zero zero short and narrow
cut the bone and gnaw the marrow

http://www.asondheim.org/running.mov - performance at Exhibit A opening,
Second Life, Odyssey

http://www.asondheim.org/lessens.mp
4 - motion capture choreography studies




before all this


'Ubeidiya culture - Israelo-Abbevillian v Israelo-Olduvan (Stekelis my
teacher) Israelo -> placeholder: deep hiatus in relation to identification
the figuring at Berekhat Ram - earliest reported piece of art 'Ubeidiya
was the first place/holder 1.4-1.7 million years ago, emigration from
Africa - Acheulian tools at the dawn of hominid culture - Berekhat Ram -
early figurine I walked the trenches at 'Ubeidiya, hand-axes everywhere
embedded in the dirt walls, sacks of them at the edge of the site - how
could so many be produced by so few? so Israelo- becomes the placeholder
at this moment, perhaps Palestino- earlier or later - our time here is
minimal in relation to the depth of the early pleistocene - synchronical-
ly, the median lies well within the Olduvan; diachronically, the demo-
graphics fall pretty much now - twentieth-twenty-first-century collusion
bringing pre/history to an end; elsewhere I've written about the 'uncanny'
in relation to the site - holding, figuring, tools last held by almost-
humans

now when voice comes to Second Life: who will speak for identification,
morphing or the granularity of the real making its appearance across the
wires, given as such, taken as such? we're at the threshold of what
appears beginning, here/now, of the virtual, 'pain has turned the thresh-
hold to stone,' of the post-pleistocene - of the post-hominid landscape
whose details still escape us

what is the relationship between the grain of the voice and
SL originary history - what is an original of the voice - who spoke
and with what 1.7 million years ago -

the genidentity of the voice - genitdentity of locus of human production
- the voice which is self-identical, the rootless voice, the voice without
substance, the body untied to the voice, voice untied to the body -
genidentity of the voice: analogic transforms from real to real - return
to stone, to the stones, to material culture continuously absentint
itself, taking everything with it

7-day weeks - Onedy, Twody, Threedy, Fourdy, Fivedy, Sixdy, Sevdy 4-week
months 3-month seasons ... Even with your studies, you need to meet
people. I know! ... 7-day weeks - Onedy, Twody, Threedy, Fourdy, Fivedy,
Sixdy, Sevdy 4-week months 3-month seasons ... Even with your studies, you
need to meet people. I know! ... 7-day weeks - Onedy, Twody, Threedy,
Fourdy, Fivedy, Sixdy, Sevdy 4-week months 3-month seasons ... Even with
your studies, you need to meet people. I know! ... 8 bit bullet list
marker is recognized. september ninth nineteen sixdy, ... paragraph this
is a mail message that i received one day. i didn't make it up ... The
preprocessor is actually a series of small consecutive functions, which
may be thought of as one long pipeline. Each function makes certain
assumptions ... Help others find this item. Make a Search Suggestion |
Manage your Search Suggestions. No-one has made a Search Suggestion for
this item yet. ... Konference se bude konat v prostor ch katedry filozofie
FF v Plzni stnosti ... www.kfi.zcu.cz/fivedy E-mail: schust@kfi.zcu.cz ...
jemu
v r mci chodu katedry jeho kolitelem, vedouc m katedry, tajemn ky ... v
jednotliv ch kurzech, p prav ~[ a organizaci ~Yij
a ...


==

Pas.

From last night's Millennium screening greatly reduced

http://www.asondheim.org/pas.mp4
with Sandy Baldwin
and thanks to Ian Murray, Sugar Seville

11 short dance motion capture sequences in combination with walk/fly modes
in Second Life. Sound: Alan Sondheim (Ensoniq Mirage)

siting the edge of SL - at this particular point, SL/RL physics is trans-
formed into aberrant behavior; objects are literally deconstructed.

Think of these as collisions, speed-motion studies, the last digital ikon,
emptied signifiers, transformations of desire, metaphors for metonymy.

n : substituting the name of an attribute or feature for the
name of the thing itself (they counted heads)


Friday, March 02, 2007

the form of fold catastrophes. images from the edge of Second Life



performance scripts from motion capture with missing sensors tending towards infinity; data is returned in

Monday, February 26, 2007






during Chicago's Openport Festival from the Sear's Tower. punctured page of the flat landscape, circular oceanic horizon, phenomena at the edge of the world, crystal 115 77 97

performance performance

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

d f
breakin through into another banned space through root avatar image displaced from object itself also see http://www.asondheim.org/breakin.mov thank you

Sunday, February 18, 2007



two dancers two dances two roses two worlds

Friday, February 09, 2007

Here is the problem, as anyone following my work can attest - there's too much of it. I'll be at the Openport festival in Chicago the end of the month, doing a symposium, talk, two performances. So I'm attempting to organize files for the last, and it's difficult. I narrowed the video/audio work to 900 files - and these are edited from the mass of my video/audio work in general, running I think into the 1000s. I've placed the files in two folders, Performance 1 / 2. The names (titles) of the files convey nothing. I'm still naming from the film years when one produced "pieces" with such. So there are 900 names, and I forget what most of these things are. It's not even easy to tell by extension - there are sound files with .mp4 and the video files almost all end in .mov, even though some of them are modified .mp4 with H.264 compression that use up a lot of processor time.

Thumbnails won't do - they would be too difficult to manage, would clutter up the screen, wouldn't handle audio. I think of code - G for Geneva, D for dance, GG for Gruyere, GA for Aletsch glacier work - but then the individual pieces are still left behind. I've tried brief 2-3 word descriptions in the titles, but that doesn't seem to help. All of this has to be on the screen when I'm performing - that's the whole point of it - the ability to choose video/audio on the fly. I'm not sure where to take this, memorizing indices in my head, mnemonics ... The total number of still images that I work with (i.e. not family) is about 10000. The total audio, probably 1000; the total video, I imagine around 1500.

I swim in these. I need a directory structure for everything, coupled with a search engine; I need keywords and a way to delimit and present files during performance; I need a system which is easily understandable. I'm speaking of approximately 200 gigabytes of material here. Of course any suggestions greatly appreciated.

- Alan

Friday, February 02, 2007




Last year there were more manatee deaths, almost all as a result of human callousness, than any other in history. The species will go extinct if we don't take action. Please consider donating or joing the Save the Manatee org.

Thanks, Alan