<nettime> sondheimography digest x5: frank x1, sondheim x4

[nettime's_indigestive_system <nettime@kein.org>]

frank <bitte@gmx.de>
     Re: <nettime> sondheimogram [x4: looking/whirr, when, check out 2L,

Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
     theory packed analysis
     Weather, Sync, and Physics in SL from yesterday 
     The Newborn Age     
     (My review of Jon's Marshall's book among other things): RCCS: 

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Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:32:40 +0100
From: frank <bitte@gmx.de>
Subject: Re: <nettime> sondheimogram [x4: looking/whirr, when, check out 2L,

wtf?

Alan Sondheim schrieb:

>                [digested @ nettime --mod(tb)]
>
> Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
>
>      looking for aylan whirr whirr whirr     
>      when the meet  
>      Check out installation in Second Life by DC Spensley (fwd)
>      Complaynte of Numbers 
 <...>

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Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:24:40 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
Subject: theory packed analysis

theory packed analysis

the physics engines in virtual worlds lead to holes and confusions; what-
isthis i don't know, something swooped by; it's probably one of mine
however ownership is defined; in telejump incremental teleports tending
towards the same location consistently jump the avatar around on what
might be considered an acre of space or so; the jumps appear random; they
have to be determined; there's no weather only whether; that's more
profound than it might seem to be; on first reading; after a while working
in these space you pay more attention to the tropes; i remember our first
travels in the everglades; we'd look at the alligators and larger fauna in
general; after a while we were down to the level of insects and periphy-
ton; our living in the world changed in relation to the increasing depth
of our knowledge of the land; going from macro- to micro-scopic; beginning
to comprehend the skein of that part of the world; in second life some-
thing similar happens but to a lesser degree; there's nothing all the way
down or rather the plateau is shallower; that makes virtual worlds all the
safer; not to mention the lack of alterity, at last so far; you can always
log out; nothing follows you; you're always already in the process of
being-born; there's no annihilation; you might disappear for a while; you
might in fact vanish; what jon marshall calls 'ascence'; the states are
always mixed, superimposed, in-between; but without depth; there's no
laterality; no continuum; so the symptoms themselves become obdurate; as
if there were a depleted and impoverished granularity to the world; that
granularity and no further; for that matter the physics itself peters out;
you wouldn't get for example quantum phenomena on the scale of the bit; or
at least you might get at best some sort of formulaic approach; on the
other hand the grain of space-time might well meet the grain of gamespace;
on the order of dozens of magnitudes smaller; where you're playing is safe
that way; there's no holes to fall through; games survive miraculous hacks
but they don't survive corporate collapse; except as remnants or reminders
of saved databases; saved in part; like the programmed texts in moos or
muds; so i'm a virtual-worker like a sex-worker or cultural- worker; so in
clearing grounds or trying out one thing or another i notice stuff; like
the texture moving by at high speed or the avatar telejump to nowhere as
if it were out of control; that's perception for you; one might think if
one believed anything that god was a game-engine; that's not in the
subjunctive; so a virtual-worker gives hirself to the game; hir safe-self;
there's no turtles all the way down; the void is parameterized; for that
matter emptiness; which takes on the quality of an ontology within the
virtual; that much is clear;

http://www.alansondheim.org/telejump.mov
http://www.alansondheim.org/whatisthis.png

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Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:23:53 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
Subject: Weather, Sync, and Physics in SL from yesterday 

Weather, Sync, and Physics in SL

The following have come out of the show in Second Life -

ian.mp4 is based on Debris Field, the title of the installation - since it
was near closing, I took out a lot of the elements present and added one
which was duplicated - this was made for Ian Ah. There are about 100 of
these; in ian.mp4 the avatar travels through them. What's interesting is
the way they align themselves into two groups, at either ends of the field
- and the way the particles from the groups form somewhat random vortices.
You can see the alignment in sync.mp4 - I removed the particles for this,
so the objects are clearly visible and divided into two sets of equivalent
but out of sync motions. I'm fascinated by this - I think the field itself
must be divided into two different land parcels. So virtual worlds go -
they're stitched together. The last video, vortices.mp4, maps the weather
over the regions - particles cross boundaries without changing direction,
but their initial impulse comes from their parent region. There's a fairly
complex physics at work here - the vortices are in 3d of course, or 4d
dynamic objects. In a sense this is a computer modeling of a computer
modeling - the programmed space made visible by a layer of programmed
responding particles and particle generators.

So what emerges? Stitching, vortices, weathers without precipitation or
effect on 'concrete objects' (i.e. only on particles). In the future, the
stitching will cover larger and larger areas, precipitation will leave
floods, wind damage, and destruction in its wake; and grounds will muddy,
dust bowls will render the virtual land virtually fallow...

http://www.alansondheim.org/ian.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/sync.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/vortices.mp4

Below are some stills from the above as well as others of the elements in
the debris field, including a few of Julu Twine with different elements as
well.

http://www.alansondheim.org/ arena pngs and jpgs


| Alan Sondheim Mail archive:  http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
| To access the Odyssey exhibition The Accidental Artist:
| http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22
| Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org
| sondheim@panix.com, sondheim@gmail.org, tel US 718-813-3285

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Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:16:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
Subject: The Newborn Age     

The Newborn Age

http://www.alansondheim.org/back1.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/back2.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/back3.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/back4.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/back5.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/back7.png

another masque for Alan Dojoji aka Aylan Dojoji aka Julu Twine; hir body
switched back to female (during performance), hir prosthesis switched back
to male. It's an uncomfortable image; a close friend in Brooklyn has
cancer now and this figure (in the sense of trope) appears to carry, not
sexuality, but death upon hir. It must be seen that the entire avatar is
prosthetic, that it breaks down into prosthetic and malleable parts, that
many of the parts are detachable, and in fact, that many of the parts are
detached. I do not dream of hir but dream through hir; as transitional
object, s/he returns the repressed into furious transformations of the
landscape - furious in the sense of quickly thrown up, in spite of their
complexity. You go in now and it's different than yesterday, you go in
tomorrow and it's different than today. As fetish-object, avatar and hir
space. S/he wears the space like s/pace, like cloth, action-cloth, flex-
bile prims (object-units). S/he's about the only identifiable element in
place. Literally s/he channels the show, pointing towards a place in
s/pace or thing - then adding, subtracting, distending, wryting, wrything,
among new or old objects until everything appears to gleam again or
respond in sullen misery. Kristevan semiology, grammar of tropes and
tropic grammar, s/he moves among the concretization of theory, stopping
here for a moment for a slim series of portrait-images on the ground,
beneath the surface of the sea, in the sky - in Second Life, it makes no
difference. S/he is always already newborn, refreshed at 60 hz, redrawn by
a distant machinic tended by sysadmins who never came close to hir image,
hir presence or coordinates, hir history, what s/he has accomplished as if
by hirself in an untoward or contrary manner.

Meanwhile closer to earth, Linux Journal has an article on SL and open
source, really elementary, but next issue promises more. I bring this up
only because of its description of SL art, which is similar to other
descriptions, and almost always refers to the surrealist/dadaist juxta-
position of objects and movements, bordering on fantasies. What about
this? Only that artists who are doing truly original work in SL - Gaz for
example - are ignored, while art seems to have shifted into fairy-tales. I
would love to see something in the more or less popular press about the
radical _alterity_ of Second Life - the ability to create ab nihilo so to
speak, not even from the ground up. The epistemology of the world itself
can be questioned, as well as s/paces and places almost inconceivable,
even as dreamwork, elsewhere. Enough with wings and sparkles!

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Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:37:48 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
Subject: (My review of Jon's Marshall's book among other things): RCCS: 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:00:34 -0800
from: David M Silver <dmsilver@usfca.edu>
reply-To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org
to: air-l@listserv.aoir.org
subject: [Air-L] new reviews in cyberculture studies (february 2009)

Dear list members,

(nearly) each month, RCCS publishes a set of book reviews and author
responses ( http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp ). books of the month for
february 2009 are:

Double Click: Romance and Commitment Among Online Couples
Author: Andrea J. Baker
Publisher: Hampton Press, 2005
Review: M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo
Author Response: Andrea J. Baker

Living on Cybermind: Categories, Communications, and Control
Author: Jonathan Paul Marshall
Publisher: Peter Lang, 2007
Review: Alan Sondheim
Author Response: Jonathan Paul Marshall

enjoy. there's more where that came from.

david silver
http://silverinsf.blogspot.com
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