Informal account of the Internet Text at 25-plus years or so - http://www.alansondheim.org/bay1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/bay2.jpg In early 1994, I gave myself the task or structure of writing a post a day, for the foreseeable future; that was over twenty-five years ago. (This was the continuation of an artistic practice I had engaged in, offline for years.) There was one time when I missed about three days, when Azure and I were out on Fire Island in New York with a friend. But all that was made up; in the earlier years, I often had 2-3 posts a day. These were related, for me, to Minima Moralia or other short-form philosophical/literary works, but almost immediately they extended into imagery, sound pieces and videos, based on computer-generated or -modified structures. There were texts dealing with sexuality and abjection. There were accounts of experimental motion capture with software altered by Gary Manes. There were accounts of dance performances that involved mixtures of real and virtual, each inserted into the other. There were performances of mixtures. I used programs in Q-basic or basic, began modifying things in lpmuds, moos, and talkers, rewrote the Eliza program in emacs, created small havoc with Visual Basic and early html, and so forth. I began using linux almost immediately, installing very early versions of RedHat on my machines. I can't remember all the shortcuts I used. I worked with newsgroups and IRC and at one point 'ran' a United Nations conference on IRC for Mike Gurstein's work on community informatics. I also worked with him in Sydney for two weeks on 'wiring Nova Scotia.' My interests have always been in the interstices and edges among digital and analog 'closures,' real bodies and their mappings into and out of digital machinery, the 'obdurate' natural environment we were given as our birthwrite and -wrong, and what happens at the edge of collapse in various domains. I've always emphasized philosophies based in part on mathematics, in part on the phenomenology of the body, early on in part on post Lacanian thinking and my consideration of the distinction between inscription and fissure, and in part on a dense poetics that owes to Jabes, Levinas, Irigaray, Kristeva, Celan, and others. Because I've moved from institution to institution, and for the past eighteen years have been largely out of them, I'm constantly dependent on the kindness of friends and strangers to have access to advanced equipment; as a result, I've developed the ability to work quickly in these situations, producing around the clock as much as possible. My writing has gone in two directions - a more straight-forward philosophical- analytical one, describing as best I can what my productions actually represent and how that representation functions; and a more poeticized one, full of holes and windows, letting the blank space of the page or extended metaphoricity of the texting carry on beyond my means. In terms of the latter, I've worked extensively with small text-generating or -augmenting programs, as well as codework in various forms - so that the backbone of the text becomes part of the content, as if the microbiome itself and its partial governing participate in the generation of meaning for the reader or viewer. I've never tried, with the latter, to force meaning, but to engage the viewer in this generation. And increasingly, as neoliberalism becomes the order of the day, as governments become increasingly harsh, as strongmen seize power, I've moved into rethinking the somatic, the tissue and interiority of the body, of any body, of any organism, and its relationship to wounding, to dying, to catastrophe, to genocide, to species extinction. But always attempting to stay within the body, as if the texts, images, and sounds were embedded in the tissue itself, within and without the nervous system, with and without damage. I've also become more and more engaged with soundwork, both on a number of instruments, and within the limited use of digital programs; this has also been done with others, as I'm not basically a programmer. Here I've worked in three directions - as partner in a series of songs written, often from my texts, by Azure Carter, and sung in and against my improvisations; as working on the idea of time-reversal, in particular, having notes 'appear' before they are played, and appear in reverse (a physical impossibility that can only be approached through bufferings of various sorts), as if one could reverse death and destruction by means of this; and, finally, working on techniques to play acoustic instruments as fast as possible, so that the usual ongoing mental structures for organizing improvisational music in real time no longer hold, and the mind has to work with new and different forms of constructing sound. All of this, then, has been occurring for well over a quarter of a century; I find myself often failing myself, becoming inadequate to the task, and this has also led me to thinking about the related ideas of failure and inadequacy, and what might be done with them and through them. When these sorts of things occur, I write more or less formal essays - so there's one on inadequacy, one on avatar behavior in untoward spaces, one on emanants (a term I use for experimental avatars in experimental abstract or virtual spaces), several dealing with 'gamespace,' 'edgespace' and 'blank- space,' mapping unknown and unexpected anomalies in various digital and non-digital environments, etc. Early on, I also considered the phenomenology of the analog and digital, and how they intersect at various limits. And finally, I wonder, always, for how long can I keep going in this fashion? For me, every piece has to appear as if it's added something to the whole, some additional approach or thought or something to what I'm doing. It also has to - almost all the time - and almost all the time it does - make me uncomfortable, as if I've gone too far, pushed my comfort zone and boundaries past the point of no return; in fact, with all of this I'm somewhat fearful... But at least I have the space and time and hopefully the ability to keep on going - for no other reason, perhaps, than my work and thinking have no closure _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
