[NetBehaviour] Passive-Aggressively Blowing My Own Horn

[Ann Non]

Alan, you're living in my heart.
Love,
Willy

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> Passive-Aggressively Blowing My Own Horn
>
> ===================
>
> Early on, around 1994-5, I developed the concept of 'rewrite,' the enunci-
> ation/announcement of online presence - an ontological performative funda-
> mentally changing the way humans communicate.
>
> I developed the concept of 'defuge' to indicate a kind of disinvestment or
> staleness that psychologically characterizes aspects of online and offline
> life.
>
> I worked through the 'inscribed body'/'body of inscription' in relation to
> 'culture all the way down,' placing the semiotic register across all
> species, and this in relation to an examination of the phenomenology of
> culture itself.
>
> I worked extensively with the idea of 'third sex,' produced solely through
> the dynamics of a linguistic register in various social applications; in
> this respect, I further developed the concept of lag as seductive lure.
>
> I did early work on MOOs and talkers, creating what would later be called
> codework pieces, by manipulating the database labels of both; I also
> worked on a phenomenology of talk/chat applications, ranging from MOOs to
> IRC.
>
> I created a number of codework pieces, interfering in IRC channels,
> rewriting talker and MOO databases, and so forth.
>
> I created the word 'codework' to reference a style of writing in which
> code-bones are apparent, scrabbling the surface and depths of texts, and
> in this regard was a forerunning of flarf, early on google-scraping and
> working with perl programs and unix/linux scripts to reconstitute texts,
> drawing new extended meanings out of them.
>
> With the help of Florian Cramer, I extended the structure of the Chinese
> Thousand-Character Essay into other texts, using a perl program that kept
> only the first instance of a word, in its proper order; I operated upon
> Genesis in this fashion.
>
> I have worked with one of the longest-running art projects online - the
> Internet Text, which I add to daily, and which was started at the begin-
> ning of 1994.
>
> In Second Life, I have constructed a new and extreme style of artwork, in
> which real-life textures are combined with 'alien' shapes and spaces,
> having no basis in the real world.
>
> With Foofwa de Imobilite and Azure Carter - we have pioneered a form of
> dancework called 'avadance' from avatar movement, and this movement itself
> has been pioneering, using software- and hardware-altered motion capture
> equipment to create 'inconceivable' mappings of human behaviors.
>
> Through Gary Manes, I pioneered in the creation of dynamic filters for
> motion capture processing; these parallel graphic filters in image-proc-
> essing programs, but they transform both time- and space-coordinates.
>
> Using Blender, I have created avatars without any human or organic feat-
> ures whatsoever, adding human behavioral patterns to them, in order to
> examine the phenomenology of behavioral 'reading' without cues from a body
> image itself.
>
> In music, I have pioneered new guitar techniques, as well as extended the
> possibilities of instruments such as Alpine zither, hegelung, and cobza.
>
> I have written one of the first extended works dealing with body abjection
> and discomfort, centered on cancer, through the use of codework and other
> textual manipulations.
>
> Early on, I created a series of raw texts from net-sex - texts which led
> to the concept of 'wryting,' inscribing the body itself as projection and
> introjection; this led to the concept of 'jectivity,' indicating the
> psychological and psychoanalytical flows between agents, screens, desire,
> and programs.
>
> Along the same line, in an extended text called Textbook of Thinking, I
> created a 'ruptured' analysis of the obscene and the abject as existing in
> a different register, within or beneath the linguistic - this deeper
> register (related to Kristeva's 'chora') underlies human communication and
> behavior.
>
> Early on, I wrote on textual interfaces in linux, and their phenomenolo-
> gies; I also analyzed talk and ytalk in linux/unix as representations of
> the body on-screen, in terms of screen 'real estate.'
>
> Through textual avatars such as Nikuko, Travis, Alan, Jennifer, and Julu,
> I worked through psychological and psychoanalytical issues of projected
> identities; these characters appeared anywhere from talkers to IRC to
> email to newsgroups to Second Life.
>
> In terms of philosophical issues, I wrote extensively on the relationship
> of the 'analogic' and 'digital' registers, using the abacus as a starting
> point; this also has led to a series of purely philosophical texts, such
> as Sophia and Philosophy, which utilize conceptual organization as a way
> to structure analyses of the real.
>
> I have written as well on the fundamental entanglement of the real and
> virtual, within the phenomenology of inscription - an entanglement that
> virtualizes and mirrors any ontology, within any other.
>
> I have written what might be the deepest analysis of Second Life from
> within - that is, an analysis of virtual worlds and worlding, in a series
> of texts gathered in The Accidental Artist.
>
> In dance, I have created a series of 'possibilities' using VLF (very low
> frequency radio) in order to create a dialectic between choreography/
> movement and the 'invisible' radiating world at large.
>
> (I should mention my early video- and film-work, based on new techniques -
> for example, in the early 1980s, I created a 16mm (sound) film a week,
> using multiple in-camera processing, layering optical soundtracks on the
> fly, and so forth.)
>
> Within the sociology of postmodernism, I have analyzed the social in terms
> of radiations and dusts, using these to model transmission (both basic
> and parasitic) and reception across a variety of spectra.
>
> Along the same lines, I have written on the phenomenology of VLF, short-
> wave listening, and similar things which emphasize hunting virtualities in
> worldings that are always already continuously evanescent and vanishing.
>
> Early on, I created artworks using Quickbasic and Basic, to create images
> that scattered from within, as well as fractal traces using a phenomenolo-
> gy of measurement - these led to considering the boundaries of the visual
> in relation to the boundaries of the world, which was also built upon a
> re-examination of inscribing between x and -x in set theories.
>
> Earlier still, I created pieces that involved 'driving in 4-space' -
> moving through four-dimensional space - the image was flattened to a
> 2-space vector screen.
>
> And slightly later, using UCSD Pascal, I created 'active-editing' programs
> that would take textual input and transform it on the fly; this led to an
> analysis of parasitism and noise in situations where it seemed imperative
> to transmit a message through a hostile environment.
>
> These same techniques were used, within the past few years, as a way to
> interfere with three-dimensional modeling programs, so that it became
> almost, but not totally, impossible to reconstitute the original image
> from the scan - and this led, in turn, to reworking avatar bodies them-
> selves in second life, producing anomalous and unreadable structures
> motivated by avatar 'intelligence' within them.
>
> And so forth.
>
> ===================
>
> So where is this work? Scattered among chapbooks, print-on-demand books
> (which are never available for review or perusal), within the Internet
> Text and at the website I use to temporarily store files (temporarily -
> given the limited storage I have). There are archived materials at the
> Ohio State University in Columbus; there are materials that will be
> archived at New York University in Manhattan. There are over twenty-five
> hours of films still at Filmmakers Coop, where they sit and decay. There
> are several cds, and three non-publish-on-demand books, none of which
> discuss any of the above. There have been a number of manuscripts which
> continue to gather dust. At one point I self-published several dvds and
> texts, but that proved impractical.
>
> What happened? My work is difficult to grasp; it moves too quickly among
> disciplines and (artistic) communities; almost all of it is non-academic
> in style; it's unsellable; it's parasitic on email lists, and appears (as
> this text appears) only as noise; it's sent to /dev/null one way or ano-
> ther; at times it appears too neurotic, sexual, intense, moribund, diffi-
> cult, or depressive; it takes far too much time to read and/or process; it
> seems to short-circuit itself; I'm socially awkward, etc. etc.
>
> What will happen? Surely nothing until after my death, and then, if the
> works survive on someone's machine, something might come of them; however
> by then, they'll most likely be outdated.
>
> This can only end on an "ah, well...".
>
> ===================
>
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