TALK: (Texts used for several talks 1999-2000.) http://www.alansondheim.org/story.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/avatar.jpg Issues (sites, sore spots, problematics) There is no Net (instead, fantasms, membranes, "historic" sites and strategies, accumulations of communicative domains) (Online History) Early IBM XT Monochrome Bulletin Board Email lists - Future Culture Newsgroups - exchange, spamless, sexed, sexual narratives IRC similar Ethos of freeware, shareware, exchange ASCII art, animation Writing about gender switching on MOOs, MUDs Writing to email lists about cybersex, community (do such exist) [Space of filtrations, media, proliferations, coalescences] Identities and persons (first, second, third) Early characters (Honey, Tiffany, Travis) - presences across applications, body and mind part-objects, struggled Middle: Net sexuality, exploration of the virtual body. Address, protocol, recognition, "hysteric embodiment," ascii unconscious. Use of Iphone, CuSeeMe, pressure of the body up against the screen. Jennifer-Julu explorations of applications and protocols. Late: Exploration of Javascript, other programmings. Jennifer-Julu webpages and Jennifer book; the .julu program Tendency towards performativity. Defuge, psychosis, splitting. Interpenetrations, Nikuko "bratting" on the surface. --- Some stuff I'm going to talk about on Wednesday My Internet Text began around the end of 1993, and is now about 6 megs long. Texts are sent, most often once a day, to various lists - always to Fop-l and Cybermind, earlier to Future Culture, and later, on occasion, to Poetics. Rarely, texts are sent to other lists as well, including nettime and eyebeam. Early on, I began with issues of recognition, address, protocol, desire, and the self as a continuous rewrite; there were avatars such as Tiffany, Honey, and Travis, laying the ground - speaking as if they were on MOOs, MUDs, or IRC. Later on, long-wave formats developed - considerations of early mid-east languages in relation to the Net, self-reflexive avatars such as Jennifer and Julu, transgressive avatars such as Nikuko, Net archeologies, issues of epistemology and ontology - almost everything with virtual subjectivity as an underlying theme. The normative mode has been writing, using intersections or interpenetrations as well - for example, altering sendmail.cfg files, simple hackings of IRC or newsgroups, multiple entries into talkers or MOOs, use of the doctor (Eliza) program on emacs, and creative use of perl, sed, and awk for active or passive text alterations/substitutions. Other modes have included graphics and the results of javascripting, as well as experimental webpages available only when my desktop is online. The first site for the text was at jefferson.village.virginia.edu as part of the Spoons philosophy lists; this used absolute URLs and the gopher protocol and was set up by one of the Spoons members. There are currently space limitations here. The mirror site, through Jerry Everard, is at the Australian National University in Canberra, and employs relative URLs and the http:// protocol. Both sites share texts; the latter also has graphics and javascript. In working through the texts, I have also used CuSeeMe, Iphone, a private MOO, and other forms which create "experience" and alternative viewpoints for the writing. To whatever extent is possible, I put myself on the line. Both sites share resumes and indexing. The index file is passive (not hypertext) and lists the broad subjects of the text. Files are named in various orders, the most prominent being a,b,c, etc. - then aa, ab, etc. - but these orders are broken and skipped for various reasons. In other words, the ordering is somewhat irregular, although the order is clear on the opening page. The Internet Text, like the Fop-l or Cybermind lists, possesses its own aura, which includes the lists, the Jennifer book printed by Chris Alex- ander, the various e-zine and off-line reprints, Being on Line, various talks, and so forth. The text is obsessive; I write/read every day. If I can't for one or another reason, I develop insomnia, shuddering, excessive self-doubt. In other words, an addiction. The text pushes boundaries, towards an intermingling of forms, self and avatar, performative and declarative modes, and so forth. When the text "works" for me, I feel uncomfortable. When defuge, decathected exhaustion, sets in, I may rely on quotations of other authors to provide impetus, or my own older texts. But there are themes that run their course, long-waves and shorter (such as the current parable series), that carry me along. I ransack sources and cultures, searching for communicative and epistem- ological resonances - such as Australian CB behavior, or the distribution of cuneiform systems in the early mid-east. While I tend to use metaphors, and the avatars themselves may be consid- ered as such, I refuse to reify metaphor, to treat it as a determinative articulation. In this fashion, I have little to say, except that self and other and text, etc., are dissolutions, splays, sprays, emissions; there are no end to them, nor to theoretical articulations. I think of the Text as the massification of theory and a deconstruction degree-zero which devours itself; theoretical part-objects are thrown off as so much centrifugal debris. There is a pointillism to all of this, just as there would be in the investigation of any world. Finally, I consider that I write / wryte myself into existence, and that I just as easily write / wryte myself out of existence. I am a fabrication of language. The fabrication tends towards transgression as write - writing in the usual sense - tends towards normative activity, and wryte - the almost hysteric pushing of the body and desire through language - tends towards a discomfort which brings the material of the self to the fore- ground. I will look at ruptures or disturbances created by characters resonating or interfering with configuration files, MOOs, MUDs, talkers, and IRC. [These disturbances develop the limits or margins of the program, reveal the substructures/protocols at work, and violate dialogs in relation to "meta"- components. But Nikuko, Alan, Jennifer, and Julu are disturbances in another way as well; they tend towards _psychosis,_ an interweaving of realities, responsibilities, and claims; so not only, as above, is it not always clear who is speaking, or who is speaking for whom - but it is not always clear that the speaker herself can separate from her creations. Voices, voices! Which will be the future of the Net, if and when it attains a state of _seamless virtual reality,_ a state of melding with the real, so that the only dis- tinction between the pratico-inert and the virtual might be, the presence of a safeword/keyword, allowing immediate movement from one to the other.] I will show how such disturbances define both the openings and foreclosures of subjectivity on the Net, and how such subjectivity is dependent on the specific performativities of various applications. [In other words, through margins, slippages, constitutions, constructs, emergences from the "depths" of software or hardware, blockages and flows and programming languages (and their phenomenologies) - only through tak- ing these into account, as well as surface manifestations, is it possible to comprehend virtual subjectivity, etc. And further, as I've pointed out elsewhere, it is necessary to consider the _projection of the self_ - its written or constituted appearance - in various applications. As examples: in IRC (above), the self appears as third-person, #<#Nikuko#># leap. In a MOO, if the user types "says hello, the reply on-screen to you would be You say "hello." and the receiver will see Jennifer says, "hello." Call this more intimate, second-person. On ytalk or Powwow or ICQ, as you type your words appear to the other, and erasures are also visible, the letters disappearing in reverse. Each participant occupies a _space_ on the screen which represents - or is - the space of the (virtual) body, constituted as written. Call this first-person, reading through one's eye into the I of the other. http://www.alansondheim.org/story.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/avatar.jpg +++ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
[NetBehaviour] TALK: (Texts used for several talks 1999-2000.)
Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour Sun, 20 Mar 2022 16:50:52 -0700
