<nettime> Absence of Light, images and theory

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Absence of Light, images and theory


The black images, Second Life, absent of air, absent of light. To make a
primitive semiotics: what's black is _not-there, bot-air._

http://www.alansondheim.org/ blk jpg series

There are two classes of black objects:

1. Architectural. These are interior building parts or prims that
ordinarily would lend support and protection for a structure. Here they
are always decorative, placed for the participant's sense of well-being.

1a.. Architectural exceptions. These are building parts that cannot be
changed because of unavailable permissions or building parts that lead
into the structure, which have their own interior/exterior, water/air/
ground semiotics.

2. Mobile objects. These are moving objects transformed into silhouettes
with unknown convoluted interiors and planar surfaces. They are invades
wishing to remain unknown; the move in strangled or stuttered orbits.

2a. Exceptions. At least one moving object is a video surface, and remains
visible. There are a number of invisible objects immediately inside and
outside the front of the structure which are also video surfaces. There is
a binary rotating group consisting of a female-in-motion-capture and a
male satellite objects paneled with male organs; the two visually lock
after an untold number of revolutions. This sits central on the gallery
floor and references the 'mudpile' object near the entrance, which is also
circular and low and is textured with the skin of a female Poser avatar.
The mudpile is also a video surface as is the complex 'curtain object'
hanging above the binary rotating group.

Schelling Hegel in addition to Gongsun Long, Wittgenstein, Carneades

1. At night all cows are black.

2. Identity as concept or image or word is self-contradiction.

3. Nothing is identical to itself.

4. A white horse is not a horse.

5. It is dark, a long object, snake or rope, is in a cave. What do I do.
What is the phenomenology.

6. Perhaps it is a white horse.

7. I would feel the texture of the air and the dim glow from the moonlight
reveals all.

8. Perhaps it is a cow.

9. At night all things are black; who is to tell a cow from a white horse.
I feel the texture of the air and dim glow.

10. I see an absence of light defined only by a visible edge. As an object
moves, the visible edge is transformed; if one thinks of the absence as a
two-dimensional bounded plane, the transformation of the visible edge
implies either an internal complex apparatus or one or more additional
dimensions and axes of rotation.

11. As objects absences of light relate phenomenologically to dark matter,
everything untoward, nothing appearing, nothing apparent, but effect.

12. Absence of light is the fundamental stratum of Second Life which only
appears when summoned, like a golem; its visibility is monitor-dependent,
and its fundamental ontology is that of bits and bytes, codes and
protocols, computer programs and languages. What appears around or outside
the absence of light is uncanny, self-thwarting, hardly an existence at
all.

13. The limits of my language are the limits of my world - from the
outside looking as language imposes its own semiosis, its structure always
already borrowed from the exterior, invisible to most; language in this
metaphoric sense is an absence, parole is just talking about things (as
ordinary school arithmetic without Godel, Skolem, Tarski, Church is just
counting 'them'). What's interior is analytic, what's exterior is sublime,
on the way to phenomenology.

14. Absence of light regions occlude one another, passage is difficult,
often impossible, we're unused to regions without internal boundaries or
names, without meaning, with their spatiality defined only by their
surrounds. At Second Life you may navigate these; in first life or real
life or that part of the true world somewhere somewhen elsewise than
digital culture or artifacts, the fecundity of the world relegates these
to the utmost periphery; think of dust-motes, dark corners, worlds beneath
floor-boards, uncanny ghosts, and somewhere in the corner of the corner, a
monitor still on, however feebly, something moving on the screen, no one
looking anywhere. ...

http://www.alansondheim.org/thewrit.mp4 , modified writing machine


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