----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hi, and thank you for the opportunity to participate in this discussion. I
had several residencies at ETC; often others came with me, Jodee Brower,
Foofwa d'Imobilite, and my partner, Azure Carter. During the residencies,
I usually produced about fifteen hours of work, which included, video,
stills/photography, and audio. I've never been comfortable working with
pieces per se (beginning a piece, finishing one, working on one, etc.),
but, early on and thinking through both free jazz (I work in free
improvisation among other things), and the art of people like Nancy
Kitchel, I was interested in a continuous production or long and almost
interminable forms (for example the 4-day improvisation at Eyebeam which
lasted I think 3-days of continuous music, day and night, with Jackson
Moore and Chris Diasparra co-organizing); even now, I keep working on an
'Internet Text,' started in 1994 and continuing daily, etc. etc. So for
me, there was the idea of inhabiting the loft/studio, working in it
constantly, day and night, as much as possible, producing and inter-
weaving things. My concerns have been several-fold - the relationship
between consciousness and formal systems potentially descriptive of the
world; sexuality, language, and the body, and the interruptions of
language at the limits of thought; issues of anguish and physical
exhaustion; and working within and without a 'fuzzy' technological
environment that spilled into psychogeographies (for example, Foofwa and
Azure dancing in the middle of the street on a cold winter's night,
wearing ballet outfits and videoed from above; Foofwa dancing on the
railing of a bridge over a frozen pond in 19-degree weather, and so
forth). There were also body works that mapped against the video
apparatus, that were permeated by the digital and its deconstruction; a
simple example was a video segment (I can't really call it or others
'pieces') opening with tone and color bars, then going to audio silence,
while the screen carried an image of me making all sorts of noises and
gestures which produced flickering rectangles of light - the translation
was impervious, incapable of recuperation, but something, some sort of
communication seemed to be going on...)
With Foofwa, our first, opening segment, that I remember, was 'Nikuko,'
consisting of him doing pirouettes rapidly, beyond the point of
exhaustion, while I spoke, clapped my hands, etc. - the sound resulting in
five cameras switching views (and filters/etc.), all aimed at him. Azure
sat in a ballet dress, watching; at the end she stands and walks off. The
piece is gritty, his dancing is furious. This was followed up by 'ennui,'
where Foofwa danced as fast as possible (against the brick wall); I played
guitar as fast as possible, Azure sang - and we did this for as long as we
could, which amounted to 10-plus minutes.
The ETC environment was incredible; one switch and everything was on, we
could pace the loft, go out at 4 a.m. for donuts, perform in the gazebo in
the middle of the night (which led to some interested altercations with
locals screaming "faggot"; run across to the bookstore for volumes that
might provide inspiration. I used the Mirage a _lot_; I wish I still had
one; its combination of analog filters and digital impetus or vice versa,
programmed in hex, as absolutely amazing. I also used a very old character
generator for text above, below, and flickering through whatever else was
going on.
We never met Sherry or Ralph; we worked with Hank, who was wonderful. As
far as archiving goes, I've probably produced about 10 terabytes of work;
I keep a directory at the url below, but it's only 30 gigabytes, and even
with wildly reduced .mp4 or .mp3, I have to keep shuffling out files;
there just isn't room for everything.
The EIAJ older videos, well before ETC, haven't been recovered, except for
the Kathy Acker Blue Film tape; as you know, the chemical decomposition of
the tapes has rendered them increasingly noisy. I worked also in VHS,
Beta, 3/4", 8mm, Hi8, tape, and now ssd like everyone else; I've been
able to convert a few things. I also worked concurrently early on with 8mm
and S8 film, later with 16mm sound; the last was often converted and then
processed in video. Even with 16mm sound, it was real-time; I used news
camera, and would run the raw film several times through them, in order to
add sound-on-sound or other visuals, etc. At UCLA I made a film a week,
dealing with the same concerns as above; I've been consistent in my
interests.
Finally a word about psychogeography (hopefully not with too much ref. to
situationism) - I'm fascinated by fossils, histories, paleohistories,
etc., and work with any local information I can, not out of idle
curiosity, but out of an attempt to come to grips with grounds, both
shifting and (hallucinatory) as-if permanent; the as-if figures in a lot
of my work. So for example, we were just in Johnstown, PA, with Jeremy
Justice, and I did several pieces with Jeremy and Azure, using the
Johnstown Inclined Plane railway, the steepest in the world (72 deg). I
came back with a number of files, and am assembling them, drawing out, I'm
not sure what, from the intersection of vista/shakuhachi/and ride. A bit
earlier, Azure and I worked with Will Pappenheimer in western Mass. -
virtual reality mixed with landscape/shakuhachi/echo - and so forth. The
more the landscape/environment speaks, the more I can withdraw, leaving a
kind of punctum behind, or maybe its absence.
Again, thanks greatly for the opportunity to participate!
- Alan
==
web http://www.alansondheim.org, [email protected]
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/tk.txt
==
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