[NetBehaviour] Carrying

[Alan Sondheim]

Carrying

http://www.alansondheim.org/nyumocap46.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/carrying.mp4

// first in a series

thanks to Mark Swarek, who organized, produced,
documented, and participated in this event;
thanks to Javier Molina, who ran the mocap;
thanks to performers Kenny Tan and Joseph Xin;
thanks to Azure Carter, who documented and
participated in this event, produced at NYU's
motion capture studio in Brooklyn.

The software uses position markers which continue to track
an avatar; no matter how convoluted the double bodies are,
the points represent the marker coordinates. The mannequin
becomes/is an emanation or emanent, no longer connected to
the points, but carried or abandoned by them. The avatar
in other words repeatedly casts off shells, alternative
histories, as the performers move. The histories are
trajectories which may be traced; the mannequin is the
remains of an uncanny presence. I think to myself, this is
the history of the world. The two performers motivated one
avatar; the avatar is a social construct, lifeless on its
own, living within the obdurate/inert. Ghosts carry ghosts.
This is a procedural semiotics simultaneously embodying
creation and annihilation, lassitude and the pointillist
presence of action. I think to myself, holographic universe
or a convolution yet unnamed, always already present,
always an actant, even in the 0-point stasis of death or
the uniformity of existence burying all metaphors; what
does or doesn't move, what signs or disappears, is moot.