Alan Sondheim on Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:54:07 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> sondheimogram [x3: swim, gmail/pine, falter]


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Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
     review and swim, where there is no water   
     Gmail/Pine 
     Falter  

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Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:29:46 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
Subject: review and swim, where there is no water   


review and swim, where there is no water

review by MinDBlinD Setsuko of The Accidental Artist (Italian)

thank you MinDBlinD

http://content.yudu.com/Aykpr/EsseElleMovieMagazin

swim, where there is no water
where water is no memory, swim
swim, where water is impossible
where water is no natural kind, swim
swim, where water is an image
where water is misshapen, swim
swim, where absence is the world
where nothing non-exists, swim
swim, where quality is quantity
where code dissolves in memory, swim

http://www.alansondheim.org/swim1.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/swim2.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/swim3.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/swim4.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/swim5.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/swim6.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/swim7.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/swim8.jpg

and a short looped film

http://www.alansondheim.org/swim.mov

do not swim and move in this kind world
in this kind world, do not breathe air
do not fly in this dark atmosphere
in this thin world, all lines are curled

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Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:48:00 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: nettime-l@kein.org
Subject: Gmail/Pine 

Gmail/Pine

Can't sleep as usual, thinking about my discomfort w/Gmail, and bones,
bones, bones -

Gmail is a corporate wrapper; skins are extraneous but beautiful. Gmail
isn't there - it loads; it's not transparent. Pine is ascii, bones and
speed. It appears within the instantaneity of human time. Deleting in Pine
is deleting; the software operates on the assumption you know what you're
doing. Delete in Gmail like so many other programs sends to the trash
directory. If you reply in Gmail it goes to sent mail. You go to sent mail
and send to trash and then delete, Gmail expands; Pine contracts. In Pine,
headers on is 'h' establishes them within the body of the full text. Pine
is replete with technical configuration. Saving in and out of folders,
directories, is just on a par with any other commands that are similar to
command lines. A lot of things use ctl-. Bouncing in Pine is everywhere
and fast, not a standard option in Gmail. Uploading email in any form is
simple from Pine, difficult but not impossible in Gmail. Pine is based on
Pico; they blend; Gmail is its own framing device. You can write scripts
in Pico; you can search Pine's directories with scripts or any way at all
- they're not bound to the software. Gmail operates within a browser that
permits sound, image, video; Pine is pure text. If I want to look at
something in Pine, I bounce to Gmail. If I want to open email securely, I
bounce to Pine. If Pine clears something, I can bounce to Gmail or open in
Pine. Pine is lean and windows are standardized; everything is designed
for fast reading, writing, filing, classifying, deleting, saving; appear-
ance is secondary. Appearance is critical in Gmail. Gmail offers messages
constantly, for example accompanying the spam folder. Pine only does what
you tell it to do. (You can control window size in Pine of course.) Pine
is not pretty unless radiolaria or porifera spicules are pretty. Pine is
old-fashioned; Gmail is new. Gmail is a multi-tasking window; Pine is
task-oriented. Gmail is multimedia even with text; Pine is text. Gmail
uses embedded italics, colors, bold, underlines, and so forth; Pine is
standard ascii. Pine is book- and text-based; Gmail is dynamic image-
based. Pine developed out of an open university system; Gmail developed
out of a closed corporate system. Gmail is part of a global struggle; Pine
is part of a local group. Gmail holds on to your email within its corpor-
ate environment; Pine holds on to your email on its server. Pine is yours,
Gmail is theirs. Inscription is yours, vision is theirs. Where Pine
speeds, Gmail displays. No one knows what I do in Pine; everyone knows
what I do in Gmail. Gmail appears to load everything; the page changes
when the directory changes. Pine appears to load nothing. Pine appears
inhering but always steps out of itself with open directories and open
source. Gmail appears expansive but remains within itself with closed
directories. Gmail appears inviting; Pine neither invites nor uninvites.
Personal: I use Pine 95% of the time. I'm uncomfortable in Gmail. I wonder
if this is an age/experience thing; if the medium in fact _is_ the message
and the message is always audio-visual wonder. But I use Pine within a
Windows or X-Window format within its own window that also harbors through
telnet, all of the tools of Unix or BSD or Linux. Gmail exasperates me; if
I write quickly, text or email, I want to go back and forth between pro-
grams and back and forth from external files to email. I want to see al-
most nothing on the screen except for text. I want the text to appear as
if it's mirroring thought, as if its inscribing is an external that has
evolved within, as if it's mind in the text, not waters. I want the speed
of thought, or what passes for the speed of thought. I want raw sememe,
not corporate splatter. But then at one point I played with bang paths,
with escape commands, with relay. I felt I was mind in the wires, not
text, that text was surface, just as now I feel that Gmail is surface. And
before that, there were those who wrote letter by letter making protocol
work without these frames at all; I remember once having a sense of this,
working with an HP from 1984 with 9 lines of text and no storage - finding
a way to send and receive files from the Panix server without ftp at all -
a minor accomplishment, but pointing again to bones, bones, bones. And
there are bones all the way down and up; Gmail will transform into holo-
graphic transmissions, molecular pipelines, while we're all gnawing roots
in the ground. (I may have details wrong in the above, but you get the
drift which itself seems crippled to me.)

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Date: Thu, 25 Dec 2008 05:59:42 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: nettime-l@kein.org
Subject: Falter  

falter

faltering because falling through black-space
in and out of black space
doing the avatar dance faltering while falling
"The joy the avatar brings to the world's cold winter is the joy of
weatherless dance and limbs akimbo."
doing the avatar dance and weathering the world outside
which is characterized by inclemency, immobility, dissolution of all
sustenance that humans hold good
"Creatures are nourished within themselves in innocence, and it is
this nourishment which parallels the other."
faltering because every step topples every other
there are infinite normal modes in a linear system with longitudinal
waves composed of equally-spaced and weighted spheres, and for all
purposes, from avadance to avasound, these normal modes are not
harmonic
they exist in irrational relationships to one another
the boundary conditions might or might not be equivalent
any ongoing configuration of the nodes under any excitation except
for null excitation never returns to any particular state; each
state appears once, each state is defined by dx/dt and the very
characterization of a state is problematic
not to mention the issue of noise in the system for we are
considering an ideal system, one formed within the geodesics,
coordinates, and matrices, not to mention multi-dimensional arrays
and indices, not to mention noise among the indices as they
increase perhaps infinitely
"The state is constituted by flux, porous and fuzzy boundaries,
and avadance is a just response to the very condition of the
state, which cannot catch a fleeing avatar."
Kira Sedlock: "Avadance is what I call what we do when we dance
like avatars, but how do avatars dance?"
Azure Carter: "They are always in flight."
Foofwa d'Imobilite: "Aren't we all."
not to mention the irregular lines of flight or chreods which only
appear to follow trajectories, but within these multi-dimensional
manifolds, anything goes, you never know what is crossing what, or
what will take you where
virtual solid manifolds possess the potential energy of faltering
they exist in irrational relationships to one another, in other
words they hardly have any reason within the space for appearing
as-such or perhaps hardly any reason without the space as well,
that is, outside the space or within the space of the presencing
of the space within.
but of course there are reasons, and reasons and reasons, and one
might as well think of avadance as that surplus which has nothing
to do with any of this, faltering on the high-beam or uneven bars,
for example, not exactly anything anyone would want to do
but there are crowds and audiences anyone may learn avadance
Maud Liardon: "Do you say 'learn avadance' or 'learn to avadance'?"
or falter, that's what one might do in these occasions
what occasions if not all occasions
that's the kink in the chain that brings it back to the start,
here is a faltering avadancer as sutured knot, closing the manifold
all over again
Alan Sondheim: "Avadancers never falter."
they never falter because escape the halter, they ought to totter:
avadance
they come to greet hir: avadance
on the way down: avadance
on the way up: avadance
suturing with needle and thread, not here, not there, avadancer!
open the manifolds: avadancer!
falter failure: avadancer!
s/he's out of here here.
they're out of here.

http://www.alansondheim.org/faltering0.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/faltering1.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/faltering2.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/faltering3.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/faltering4.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/faltering5.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/faltering6.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/faltering7.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/faltering8.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/faltering9.png

Kira says hello.

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