Text for Electronic Literature Salon Aug. 11th http://www.alansondheim.org/KD1.png (A description of the general direction of my work in relation to codework, the body, "semantic ghosting," and tools; I'll be focussing on the last, thinking about methods and meta-methods. There are a few links accessible from the pdf or rtf; the rest are only for illustation at the talk itself. Still this might be of interest to you, and more likely not!) For links and formatting see http://www.alansondheim.org/salon.pdf or http://www.alansondheim.org/salon.rtf --- 1. Very early on, 1970 something, worked on a distinction between immersive and definable operations; the latter references usual operations such as 2+3 = 5; the former, processes that are temporal and involve someone doing something. The latter is a kind of phenomenology of both body and abstraction and of course now references code. So the body was always there with me in an uneasy relationship to abstract thinking. (You can see this at work in the video I did with Kathy Acker circa 1974. 2. A few years ago I wrote on distinctions among gamespace, edgespace, and blankspace - again, while the first two are more or less formal, the last references thinking through the imaginary, projections and introjections of the body, and so forth. 3. This led further to thinking about somatic ghosting and the abject - which for that matter can also be related to the (now old) new primitives, club cultures, Covid-19, ISIS, police violence, and so forth. It's relatively simple - not thinking about the ghost in the machine, but about the body as fundamental in the matrix, in networking, in code culture, and so forth. So almost in the sense of a detective: where are the bodies? 4. I try to bring it/them into code or abject code generation, to work with uncomfortable texts and readings, to create real and symbolic parasitic noise (thinking about Serres' parasite), to problematize the usual suturing that informs artworks in our culture - framing and institutional devices, internal and external framing, and so forth. 5. Examples - ytalk - an early 2-way conversation program using telnet - the division in the screen also representing two presences or bodies. IRC - Internet Relay Chat - with its own culture - a potentially highspeed presencing of bodies - exercise with signing in a "Susie" or such - and the private messaging lighting up the screen. Or the early work I did in Pascal - see the several images - working with obstructive and noisy editing - relationship to Jewish and other refuseniks, blocked or altered messages, messages in noise, number stations, etc. Show ytalk.mp4, editor and editorpro, IRC. 6. Perl and Dialog texts following on this form - semantic catalysts - Show KD and JD images for the latter - perhaps live demo junew.pl etc. for the former. Talk about semantic manipulations - "bending" texts towards issues of the body. Early example - 4320 - towards a phenomenology of moving in 4d space. Show NYUMISC images, read text. Here moving into video - 7. Access Grid - aaggdouble - what remains of presence and the somatic among/during global circumnavigations. 8. Day in and Day out - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb3VSSzWdws series of works in Second Life, MacGrid, OpenSim localhost, trying to "bend" (again) avatars into issues of abjection. All of the videos are improvisations and almost all in real time - shape riding in text and movement. It's important that all the movements of the avatars originate in human motion - the dialog between virtual and somatic is abject, uneasy. 9. Altered mocap - too much to show here - check out Jerky Moves for Bio People for example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIIHrCG2kSo Cyborg inversions - also see Superhero Tethered - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXZschj5bwQ 10. The medical - Resonance / MRI - scan through this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhS5mxjLLdw 11. Finally, just a word on music - see Action Guitar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm4XJOFA7yI - somatic/thought elements at work here. http://www.alansondheim.org/KD2.png _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
