The Structure of Reality, 1976-77 http://www.alansondheim.org/SoR.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/StructureofReality.pdf This is the main theoretical work I wrote in the 1970s. I was reading a lot of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of mathematics; I met Hans Freudenthal and Marvin Minsky, was part of a systems group at Brown, read a lot of phenomenology as well, and was fascinated by category theory, which I didn't really understand. I could do some programming in Pascal and Basic, including early works in electronic literature. I taught at Hartford Art School, RISD, University of California at Irvine, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, etc. I was in the Paris Biennale, and Kathy Acker and I made a tape which was shown at the Whitney and Yale. I didn't really understand a lot of the math I was trying to work with, but I felt the ontology of the world was ultimately networked and networking, in other words, non-materialist. NSCAD published my Structure of Reality in 1976 (I think through David Askevold and Ian Murray); then it was reissued by Williams College through Lauren Ewing in 1977. These were bound xeroxes. I used precursors of the text in the Acker tape. Recently I was asked for a copy of the book - someone is using it in a study of her work. Azure and I made a copy of it. I still reference the material in it, although there are serious errors throughout. I have only one copy of the book left, hence the xerox. It's a large pdf - about 169 megabytes, but it's easy to download or peruse online. The beginning's difficult, but there's a lot of literary material in it as well. (There's a transcription of a talk I gave on it at NSCAD in Artists Talk: 1969-1977 by Paul Greenhalgh, Peggy Gale, et al.) Do take a look; you can ignore the diagrams and math; the gen- eral direction should be fairly clear - fundamental operations which characterize the real; a tripartite phenomenological scheme; etc. Hope it brings a little pleasure and perhaps much confusion (at least as much as it did me at the time). _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
