<nettime> sondheimogram [x2: dance and gravity, what-if]

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

               [digested @ nettime --mod(tb)]

Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
     Dance and Gravity   
     The What-If 

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Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 13:34:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
Subject: Dance and Gravity   

Dance and Gravity

For gravity is everywhere, loving us bone by bone, cell by cell, atom by
atom; think of gravity as strings everywhere in a dream, caressing and
tugging the world into shape. [...]

I envy Foofwa who travels with his body, observing the movement of the
scenery, the great wheel of the world, within the atmospheric, untoward
stars and constellations. Teleporting not only collapses distance; it
implicates space itself in fraud, the clearest evidence of database. I
long for the seamlessness of the real world, its inconceivable vulner-
ability, its joy and suffering in our darkest hours, its fantasms and
hallucinatory quality. In Second Life, one never wakes from the dream,
dream is all there is; in dance, gravity surrounds and infiltrates the
body - Foofwa travels to Lebanon on a plane whose wings suck it up into
the sky, where comfort, great circles, and vectors reign. It takes time
and shadows of dawn and dusk, morning and evening, to achieve anything.
It takes rehearsal time, stretching and turning and other movements and
parallelograms of force, the soft speaking of gravity, the hardness of
silence, among dance and a communality of dancers, audience, presenters,
choreographers, as if the world momentarily separated into categories.

In Second Life there is nothing to see; it is all visible, all present,
even give members-only barriers. It is flat, simulacrum and hyperreality
all in one; it goes nowhere. Something drops from the sky, founders, but
nothing breaks, there is no wear-and-tear. Even the text-based MUDs in a
sense were more realistic; one's avatar had to eat and drink, wore out,
perchance to sleep, but the MUDs were game-based and one can't fight
forever. Dance is brilliant burning; bodies wear out, and even today
documentation of choreographies is insufficient: What goes, what leaves
the earth in exhaustion or death has placed memory at the heart of the
world, and memory is the most vulnerable of all. Still, memory seeps into
the mind, into the very bones, of the spectator, who moves and thinks
differently, however slight; her body's muscles carry the evening, even
from the silence of a chair. It is a ritual of inhering; the scopic act,
I think, is always already ikonic, always at work with the dancer, in a
way one only dreams about in Second Life. Second Life's simulacrum is
binary, either on or off; the screen is illuminated or dark, sound and
video present or absent, and so forth; these doors don't wear out, but are
replaced by newer versions of the software brought down to hard drive by
the mother company.

Second Life seeps into the first; being in Second Life, as anyone will
tell you, is being in the first, and Second Life's dreams are tableaus in
first life's night. But still there's a difference which goes back to the
negation of the planet, negation in the world as one turns away from
another, as a species dies or a forest is logged or a community is
slaughtered. I think this is at the heart of the real and oddly at the
heart of Second Life itself, which is pushed into modes of surrealism and
the fantastic, as if it were possible to keep dis/ease at bay. I am sure,
though, that Second Life, like MUDs or MOOs or other populations, will
have its death off-screen, silencing every and all, returning these to
memory as well. (I remember the 'QRB' - quota review board - on PMC-MOO:
who even knows what I'm talking about?) By the time and space of that
death, only a virtual world will disappear, one whose weight is zero, and
whose gravity may be turned on and off at will. Or at the will of another
in physics calculated, not from the very inhering or substance of matter,
but in the matter of a suitable abstraction intentionally built-in.
Falling is no danger; and Foofwa, on his way to Lebanon for choreography,
dance, presentation, warmup, rehearsal, blocking, teaching, learning, is
up there above a game-space from which there is no escape, the 'idiotic'
and inert real of a world of given without a giver - a world whose
resource use is already above its carrying-capacity, and therefore a world
of zaniness and suffering. This is a world always at war with itself with
greater and greater fire-power, while we avatars fall and fall from the
sky, always landing in interesting ways, undamaged and somnolent while we
take a break for dinner.


| 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: Sun, 9 Nov 2008 23:08:31 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
Subject: The What-If 

(written under zero sleep, apologies, but there's 'something here')

The What-If

http://www.alansondheim.org/ layout jpgs

The last theoretical, what to do when exhausted to
the point of trembling or shuddering, unchecked for
reason, false grammar, confusion:

Vaihinger and Bentham both developed the concept of fictions or the as-if
in relation to the real: as if the perceived real were real, as if reifi-
cation were the state of things - as if the real were within the simile
and subjunctive.

The what-if simultaneously doubles and reduces the as-if: Doubles, since
it proposes an alternative branching or possible world which is an as-if
within the as-if of th real - and reduces, since a fictionalized as-if
(that is, the as-if as fiction) branched into the aegis of a dominant
fiction no longer subjunctive - the what-if as production or temporal
process creates a fiction without split - no longer 'as-if X were real
within a perceived world that is necessarily split,' but an X which is all
the real there is within a generated world or simulacrum.

The what-if simultaneously quadruples and collapses: Quadruples, since the
epistemology splits and what is real has also divided - and collapses,
since the fiction is ontologically degree-zero; one might also approach
this in terms of codes and replaced or augmented codes, or replaced or
augmented scripts or objects, therefore basic operations of annihilation,
creation, displacement, condensation, substitution, branching and
collapse.

The what-if does nothing and everything: Nothing, since ontology remains
as before, and the model - for that is what we are introducing - utilizes
the same fundamental rues, protocols, codes, and principles - and every-
thing, since what occurs is the construct of a new universe, related to
the old, but with a modification, however small.

The what-if places the world within which an enunciation is made, within
the subjunctive; it is always a time-dependent process.

Any real or virtual movement within real or virtual worlds is a time-
dependent process. But what-if is a movement with a diacritical mark or
curlicue.

The mark need not be within the real or virtual world; it may be within
the world of the spectator.

>From the outside, a change is created within the gamespace. The rules
within the gamespace are the same as before.

A change is made from without to within. A demarcation occurs, a
separation of the gamespace into before and after.

Gamespace is always already before and after; the separation occurs on a
meta-level.

The separation is semiotic and the construction of a semiotic.

The separation is a figure of speech.

There is speaking within and speaking without; a model might insist on
these distinctions: go from real through virtual through channel through
virtual through real.

Of course what is real is virtual and what is virtual is real. Of course
the channel is simultaneously real and virtual; one might argue that the
channel is the diacritical mark, the demarcation itself.

The demarcation may be fuzzy. The change from X to X' may be sufficiently
complex as to prohibit or occlude a transformation. A transformation may
occur - the result of a what-if process - without being noticed; there may
be no notification or a misplaced or misrecognized notification.

So what-if implies an impending modification within a sememe from without;
it splits from itself, constructs on a meta-level, a semiotic which breaks
through and within the discursive. The transformation within the real
virtual, from X to X' is always already sutured; the break, again, occurs
within the subject hirself outside of, or constructing an outside-of, the
gamespace.

Needless to say the what-if may be nothing more than conversational, i.e.
what if the sky were green? It may or may not result in a process applied
from without to an ostensible subject. The ostensible subject, gamespace,
world, etc. may appear, from without, broken or of interest or anomalous
or cohering or 'the same as before' within the epistemological limits of
whatever transformations are already going on. The ostensible subject is
the subject of the subject applying the what-if, that is, the external
subject, placed as well, reflexively perhaps, within the subjunctive.
Whether or not anything is 'really' carried out.

The what-if, then; is always already a thought-experiment as well, no
matter what happens later or what happens reflexively, or even within the
case where nothing happens at all.

One might say that the human project implies thrownness into and through-
out the what-if on a continuous basis, that everything and nothing is
happening, that this happening is a model for human existence and
behavior.

And in this light, a model perhaps of every organic existence and behavior
- but one might well ask if all organisms are capable of the subjunctive
in the sense used here? I would say no, that the subjunctive implies
something which, if not uniquely human, at least implies an intelligence
organized according to a just-so, which is rarely found otherwise in the
world.

Roughly, it has to do with stewardship and dominion as well, placing the
world we witness, real or virtual or worlding, under the subjunctive: to
be human is to live within the semiotic of the subjunctive.

And here, within a specified virtual world, one carries out experiments
telling or foretelling, floundered and foundered on the subjunctive - this
these experiments might be taken as fundamental as well to any human
project, if such there be. Perhaps this virtual world lacks a sense of,
lacks the catastrophic; perhaps it is this lack which permits the what-if
a discursive and reified operation. Perhaps, only just at our moment and
in this configuration, perhaps nothing more.



| 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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