<nettime> on the avatar project

[Alan Myouka Sondheim <sondheim@gol.com>]

(Another) description of current work -


For the past several years, I have been developing a _pathological_
apparatus that operates in the interstice between subjectivity and
protocol. The apparatus is characterized by the rigid designators of
proper names which serve to ground supplements or leakage across do-
mains; the names can reference avatar-constructs on one hand, and
dissolution/dispersion on the other.

The apparatus as interstice exploits system loops and resonances, as
well as repetitions and pre-verbal components in the written language;
the result is more often than not broken texts which emanate from the
throat relative to the hand. Full of glottal stops and vulnerable sites,
the texts reference a non-existent body; the name does the rest. _Julu_
processes desire, acts as consort to _Jennifer,_ who splays the residue
of sexuality. _Nikuko_ operates upon languages and misrecognitions; Ni-
kuko also constitutes a politico-monetary economy. Jennifer has infil-
trated sendmail files, talkers, and MOOs, among other applications; in
relation to Julu, dialogs are created, insisting on the reality of the
virtual "in no uncertain terms."

It is this insistence that construes psychosis, this gestural flux in
and through networks and cables. The use of extreme and/or obscene
language serves to displace or derail intercourse; speech through writ-
ing projects enunciation, the function of the throat. The topography of
the virtual body, through its topology, inverts; the display of organs
carries its own politics within the debris of theory. From the vantage
of the reader, there is always a dis-ease at work, as well as the work
required to interpret distorted language, broken semantics, perforated
syntax.

Across the board, issues are epistemological, struggling with a referent
which may be only circumscription, demarcation. Nikuko references kanji
and the presence of english as two signing systems whose interaction
occurs in the imaginary; the name slides from protocol to protocol, app-
lication to application, carrying the vestiges of a haunting or uncanny
writing apparatus whose trace or spoor is identical with ontology.

Agency is spread among actants here; the reciever/transmitter/channel/
noise/parasitic approach to communnications is blurred. There is both
strategy and struggle over the performative and its existence in several
levels, of programming, speech, person (1st, 2nd, 3rd, ...), and text.
Whatever is constituted is always already binary or triadic within the
machine; this level is a fundamental reference, but as such is always
leaky as well; there are no foundations, no ground-level platform, say,
for Jennifer.

The result is always textual, immobile-paralytic or mobile-inert; these
writings are residue of psychoanalytic operations carried out as a process
of burrowing. (The texts began when gopher:// was in detumescence.) The
writings analyze these operations as well; they are self-reflexive to
the extent that they drag protocol-debris, application-residue, to the
surface, as in the dissection-analysis of core-dump. The drag is always
an interference, drag-show. The panties are inside-out; the stains are a
lure, seduction, into and away from the content. The stains drag the
reader down and in; they break through the ostensible content, "Julu,"
"Nikuko," of the texts - scatter writing, speech, language as a churning
of pre-verbal clutter, clashes of interstitial drives, breakdown of
prefixes, interfixes, suffixes.

Language spread through its own demise, emergent psychoanalytics drugged
through networks and computer-mediated-communications. Broken language
analyzes, is analyzed through, theory; broken theory or what I call
"wild theory" results, nomadic or marauding theory. The theory chokes in
the throat; instead of weak, think of liquid theory, part-objects fall-
ing out of analysis. Theory and experience are always already inter-
twined, but here experience, tumescence, robs or displaces theory in
favor of a darker analysis. Hence the emphasis on shadows, ghosts, psy-
choses, frisson.

To accomplish what but the endurance or perseverence of virtual subjec-
tivity in these broken problematic spaces. To construct a torn discourse
or _violation fabric_ across foreclosed and corporate domains and names.
To cite myself in the final stages of withdrawal. To open. For the mil-
lennium, to love and hate my avatars. And to open/close a variety of
philosophy, simultaneously, or at least within the @blink of an @dig
$thing called eye.

http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt

Alan Sondheim

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