Alan Sondheim

Interview by Simon Mills

SM: So can I begin by asking how you see yourself? Do you conceive of yourself as an artist, a new media artist, a performance artist or maybe as a writer? Do you even think about these distinctions?

AS: I think about these distinctions a lot – not because I’m interested in specific media per se, but because grants and jobs are usually related to them. I fall somewhere ‘between’ literature, music, art, performance, video, computer art and film; as a result, I’m not part of any of these communities. To me, my work is coherent because of themes, sensibility, intensity, philosophical concerns; the medium per se is of secondary performance. In terms of identification, then, I honestly don’t know ‘what’ I am (although I hope I know ‘who’ I am). I work ‘with’ specific areas, not ‘within’ them. I remember years and years ago, on the same day – Vito Acconci telling me he had finally realized I’m not an artist – and Laurie Anderson telling me she had finally realized I was.

SM: I like that. Were they referring to the same piece of work in making these judgements?

AS: Not to any work in particular. At that point, as now, I made ‘part-objects’, pieces that weren’t really gallery- or performance- oriented – but just as now, accumulations of work that explored in one or another direction.

SM: Even from your early work you seem to focus very heavily on technology. Would you say you are fascinated by technology? Why do you think you have this bias and how does it influence your work?

AS: I’m fascinated by everything – to borrow a term from James Ellroy and Merleau-Ponty, I am filled with wonder – not just for technology, but also for wilderness, for literatures, for just about anything. My library and work tends to reflect that – some of my earlier pieces from the 1970s involved the use of a scanning electron microscope – but the goal was to perceptually ‘realize’ the microscopic landscape and biome – not to embrace technology per se.

SM: I’m interested that you mention Merleau-Ponty. Embodiment seems to be a major concern in your work which could sometimes be seen to sit uncomfortably with your focus on subjectivity situated in the virtual. Have you been able to reconcile these two areas, maybe in some sort of dialectical movement? I’m interested to hear where your work in this area has led you.

AS: I don’t think there is any dialectic here; the body has always already been virtual. Tattoos are 2-dimensional insignia, virtual cultural signs bent and curled as the body bends and curls. Scars, scratches, etc. carry the body’s history. Language is necessarily virtual; inscribed language problematizes its linguistic and embodied content.

So given that, where is mind? On one hand it appears to appear within the locus of the body; on the other, it invests in computer-virtual avatars, as in gaming, net sex, text messaging, chat room, my own work. Merlin Donald might situate this investment as inherently organic – i.e. mind moving through data-bases, imaging – through ‘external’ media. This is part of the evolution of mind.

Where the virtual appears in the older sense, qua virtual, not ‘real,’ is through communication. I may ‘inhabit’ my avatar, but I will read through the avatar of the other, who exists within the imaginary or symbolic. There are all sorts of psychoanalytical issues here. It’s this imaginary that my work explores.

I see this relationship – self/virtual/other – as inherently uneasy, dis-comforting. The intermediary is most often technological-digital – there are few exceptions (the phone system for example, until a few decades ago). It’s both distancing and allowing free play. When the net sex ‘explosion’ was going on a few years ago, there were dozens of reports in which a participant insisted it wasn’t ‘real,’ therefore ‘safe’ – even though couples broke up as a result. The S&M newsgroups were incredibly popular – people insisting that they were ‘just exploring’. So on one hand safe, and on the other, enormous investment.

On the political level, there are similar issues; given the current Iraq war, the equation seems to be self/virtual<-->/. I’m trying to diagram the virtual as a tool eliminating the other – the absence of corpses for example, of Iraqi – even our own dead and wounded. So the situation might be written (self-virtual) – we ourselves are becoming-virtual as a result of this absence. Its like a tag that has no place to ‘sit.’ The instability that occurs through this can be politically manipulated – i.e. the war is not a war, the war is safe, the war is clean, everyone loves US. I think this is one of the reasons that the so-called ‘insurgency’ (which it isn’t of course) emphasizes brutality – that gets through, can’t be ignored or controlled by the military.

In any case, this political dimension, which for me is replete with horror, is a major concern of mine – beyond any particular war – just the horror of slaughter, of mass extinctions of animals and plants, of global catastrophe appearing in the form of, say, 9/11, Katrina, etc. I believe that, at this point, resistance is futile – that, for example, the planet is so ecologically off-balance that within a few decades or so all of the megafauna world-wide will have disappeared.

And any politics, in fact, even benign politics, is as virtual as the issues, languages, and abstracted power that underlies it.

SM: This kind of apocalyptic thinking reminds me of Virilio and his notion of ‘cybernetic eugenism’ resulting from the coupling of the life and information sciences and the associated thought that the natural bio-diversity of living matter will become extinct as they are replaced by bio-engineered species better equipped to survive on an ever more polluted planet. It seems to me that a lot of people who 10 years ago were talking about the excitement of escaping the local (or even the flesh) for virtuality have now traveled full circle to find a fresh interest and importance in the ‘physical’ world. Have you witnessed this kind of general shift?

AS: I haven’t read this Virilio but it honestly seems nonsense. The world is becoming far too contaminated and too dangerous; any bio-engineered species wouldn’t be able to cope with imminent change any more than any other species. There’s far too much emphasis placed on technology, far too little on the dangers of religion, on sheer waste. We’re all at the edge of Armageddon I believe. Still, given that, we have to keep on fighting; at this point it’s literally quixotic, charging at windmills. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis
believes, for example, that the earth has passed the point of no return for global warming. And no return for a population wildly out of control, nuclear weapons out of control, terrorisms out of control.

The problem for me re: Virilio (in your interpretation of course) is that it makes it seem that there’s a ‘way out.’ Years ago it was atomic energy, universal education, plastics, solar and wind energy and so forth. The technological fix doesn’t hold, has never held. What we do find now is the killing off of other species, killing off of ourselves, as we turn increasingly vicious with dwindling resources and population pressure.

SM: I’m interested in how your practice has changed over the past 10 years with regard to New Media. I remember 10 years ago there was almost a sense of delirium surrounding the technoculture scene. It was difficult not to be caught up in it. What is you perception of that era? How have things changed for you as an artist since then?

AS: Oddly enough, things have been exactly the same for me then as now; I have a natural tendency towards both depression and pessimism, and saw far too much hype in what was then occurring. I was amazed by Anti-Oedipus when that appeared (far earlier obviously), but also felt it was in a sense too ‘male’ – I have always been more interested in Kristeva and Irigaray, for example, as a kind of liberation – it also seems that the notion of feminin ecriture would be more applicable to comprehending things cyber-spatial than the machinic physics of D/G. I do remember being contacted by R.U.Sirius at one point and contributing to one of his books (I forget the co-author); when it appeared, it seemed useless. I’m always aware of the geopolitical structure of the ‘real’ and its systemic effacements, from IraqI through IraqII into an increasingly violent future – these tendencies dominated my thinking even through the dot.com era. The references from that period are also odd, since D/G were writing much earlier, as was Lyotard, etc. Virilio has always seemed breathless to me.

For me, and this obviously dates me, the key date was May 68; that’s when the verities of classical culture – canon, genre, etc., fell by the wayside. I was young then, but it was a kind of cultural upheaval connecting so-called revolution, youth, technology, reification, deconstruction, etc. – it was also the dethroning of Sartre, which seems relatively minor today, but I relate that to the problematizing of any philosophical system or systemics whatsoever. It was also a period of radicalizing disbelief, distrust, etc., which I’ve always had. I was never a Maoist. I was never a Trotskyite. I was never Cyborg. I’ve thought and continue to think that we’ve always inhabited the virtual, that we’re in-formed by the virtual, that we’re incapable of distinguishing between virtual and real. I mean this in a very literal sense; the processes of dreaming, thinking, imagining, symbolizing, enumeration, data-mining and acquisition, etc., are all too interwoven. I veer between a poetics of this interweaving, which owes a lot to Continental philosophy/thought, and a pragmatics, which has something of the scientific or axiomatic behind it. So all of this has continued for my entire life.

A couple of things – in 1996 (I think) there was a Cybermind Conference, formed and formulated by members of the email list (which Michael Current and I started), in Perth, Australia; I was the keynote speaker. People like Stelarc were there. That was a decisive moment for me, realizing the power of online communication in the real world. It was also quite advanced technologically; in the main conference room, we had a live Cybermind MOO and CuSeeMe set up; these went out on the Net. We also had a newsgroup and the Cybermind list itself. Everything was going all at once and the results were projected next to the speakers. So the place was electrified. Around the same time, perhaps a bit later, I worked with Mike Gurstein in Sydney, Nova Scotia, on a project to wire the entire province – Canada has always been ahead of the US in technological foresight. And there I learned a lot about the concrete conditions of the Net. So these were fundamental experiences, not so much connected to the dot.com or D/G stuff. A third thing for me at that time was cybersex, when cybersex was important, was talked about; in spite of the emotional misery it often engendered, it enabled me to explore notions of virtual embodiment. Some of this material went into the Internet Text.

Finally, there’s this – that my work has always fallen between the interstices, as I’ve said before – and this has been more acceptable online, right from the beginning. I haven’t had to ‘prove’ myself, except to people like Jim Andrews, who kept insisting (I don’t listen anymore) that I’m not a ‘web artist’ or ‘net artist’ or whatever because almost none of my work is interactive. These distinctions – just about any distinctions – seem to matter less and less, and that’s for the good. I hope there are never ‘masterpieces’ or ‘canons’ or ‘genres’ of cyberspace, or that the ones that might exist now would be quickly forgotten. The Internet undergoes continuous transformation, and that’s all to the good.

By the way, the one thing that I miss from that period – its sexiness, which is now replaced by a kind of Bush/Blair-led conservatism. Remember teledildonics, Future Sex, the first Lara Croft stuff? Where has all the latex gone . . . ?

I identify totally with the left, at times the far left. That said, I think the left has made some tremendous mistakes, all the way back; one of them which is a constant, is an imminent utopianism which is often technocratic. A decade ago was a period of delusion – not only in terms of economics/dot.com stuff – but also in terms of the emancipatory aspects of the Net. There was an assumption that ‘home pages’ (now blogs) were always already for the good, that they would reflect liberal values, in spite of things like Stormfront.com. Now the net transmits beheadings, enables various far-right groups to organize, unites fundamentalists. It’s business as usual, only faster, and the left (which has always been technologically adept on an individual level) should have known better.

SM: I’m interested that you say you are interested in understanding cyberspace and what happens there via Kristeva and Irigaray rather than more masculine, machinic interpretations. They are very concerned with the body and sexual pleasure in a way that most cybernetic discourse is not. I wonder if you could say a little more about how you relate these ‘embodied’ ways of thinking with the disembodied realm of cyberspace? How has this influenced your work?

AS: I have to answer this without specific reference vis-a-vis Irigaray and Kristeva; the subject’s difficult and my time limited. That said – I think for example of feminin ecriture as an embodied writing or written body, an interrelationship that’s not pornographic, i.e. not indexical, but somehow ikonic, as if the words themselves were tissue and flesh. For this reason, I use the word ‘wryting’ to reference online texts that attempt the impossible – constructing the real, sexualized body, by virtue of the virtual. This is also related, for me, to the notion of in-scribing, writing into – cuneiform for instance – writing which is incorporated into its matrix, not an onto, not a foreign substance, but a marking or re/marking within the matrix/maternal itself. What do you do when matrix and inscription are still of the same ‘stuff’ but online? When in a sense, everything is online within an online world? My tendency is to carry over the matrix. Now this relates in some of my work (take some of the material in l.txt, which was done with Kim McGlynn), to an extreme sexuality – the same happens in net sex – as if the more extreme, the more the screen would drop away, the more bodies would commingle. The screen becomes transitive in other words, and what occurs is what I call ‘jectivity’ – both projection and introjection by means of the screen, constructing and deconstructing self and other. It’s as if the writing, wryting, were and were not the body, intermediary, abject – for me abjection is always a component of online sexuality. You can find much on this in Kristeva’s Powers of Horror in which substances and states are considered which are and are not the body, feces for example, vomit, I’d say certain sexual modes. And all of this also relates to the chora, described in Revolution in Poetic Language, that is a matrix of inchoate drives, pre-linguistic. All we have to communicate with online is language – if not written language, i.e. words and so forth, than the languaging of protocols, image compressions and file types, etc. It’s 0/1 in a strict classical sense – nothing in-between, that’s why there are checksums, to ensure that errors don’t mistake 1 for the Other. So that gesture, ‘aura,’ the pre-linguistic, etc. are channeled around, circumlocuted, circumambulated. In my work, the use of extremes in images seems a way to break down, psychoanalytically, the strictures of the medium, although the breakdown is only imaginary, the whole thing is imaginary. In terms of Irigaray, I keep going to notions of fluidity, wave-forms, fluid mechanics, treating the bits and bytes as if they could be (mathematically) integrated into smooth functions. Something of this sort actually does happen by the way with video/film – the theory of ‘persistence of vision’ to explain the illusion of movement is nonsense, what actually occurs is what occurs in everyday perception – the eye, by virtue of saccadic (sudden) movement, scanning, constructs motion – in film the saccadic movement is, at least in part, constructed by the apparatus itself. So smoothing of this sort already exists, and one might say it happens both physically and psychoanalytically in relation to online material. In my own work, I think of sound this way – sound is second-person, within one, bending corners, ignoring the ‘thatness’ of the world – sound is always speaking from an interior. The kinds of soundwork I do reflect this – good examples would be the fieldphone pieces up at my website – which were made with WWII field telephones in fact, and reflect a kind of end-of-the-world desperation made imminent. The VLF (very low frequency) radio pieces are almost literally the murmuring of the atmosphere. On another, more theoretical level, I try to locate the ‘two orders’ of digital and analog as melded, fuzzy, interpenetrating – the real is both analog (which has been identified with the ‘feminine’) and digital, and when you have something like a wave equation collapse, you have literally from 1 to the Other – the continuous collapses to a yes/no formalism. (I’m simplifying and probably wrong here.) What happens a lot with so-called ‘cyber-’ thought or Wired Magazine thought, or whatever, is that it appears so masculine, so hyper-inflated; there’s no sense of a Heidggerian waiting/awaiting or ‘releasement.’ This releasement is close to Situationist detournement, I think, to nomadic thought (I’m thinking of Pierre Jorris here, not D/G, although it might relate to both). My website – http://www.asondheim.org – partly out of laziness, but mostly out of a sense of the archeological, paleontological – is (im)precisely a site/cite of such wandering – if you go to it, you find only a directory with perhaps a thousand or so files, some are clearly parts of series, some stand alone, etc. So when you begin looking through this mass, you come across all sorts of things, interrelationships. You might discover that some of the texts for example reference some of the audio, video, or image files, and so forth (and some of the references are also dead). I’m not creating a specificity, i.e. this is what I want to present, this is a work, so much as signifiers of a virtual-real material culture. And while these signifiers are formally objects – i.e. files on a disk somewhere – they are also part-objects, interrelated, inconclusive, etc.

I’m hoping that Kristevan/Irigaray/Cixouian/etc. analysis of online worlding is occurring; I’m assuming that it is, that I’m just not seeing it. This is partly the result of currently being outside academia; I don’t go to all those conferences. And on another level, my work might be a failure in this regard as well – too dependent on sexualized vision, too phallic, too exposed.

SM: I was going to ask you about your website and the way that it is designed and organised. The way it is constructed makes it very difficult to discern a ‘project’ as it were. Most contemporary artists are at pains to make statements regarding their works and contextualise or conceptualise them. You seem to resist this and at the same time seem to be resisting incorporation into the artistic world of curation, archiving and the gallery? Would you say that is a fair reading? Do you think that the Internet and New Media has had much effect on the art world?

AS: Ah hell, I think you have me here. It goes back to issues of identity, not wanting to be categorized, to be placed under authority one way or another – I think I mentioned that in relation to Acconci and Anderson (that anecdote about whether I was an artist). To be honest, I’m desperate for fame, recognition at least – mainly because of two things – I want my work to survive somehow (at this point Ohio State University is archiving my things through John Bennett), and I need work, occupation, some way of financing what I do. On the other hand, I don’t know what sort of website would ‘make sense’ of what I do in the first place. I generally send out announcements of my pieces as I make them – the announcements are sent to various lists – I’ve mentioned this as well – and so that’s a kind of inroads to what I do. But you’d have to read the files as I send them out. For people coming raw to the site, I think the best thing would be to go through files – just any files – in any order – and see what’s there. I’d love to be curated mind you, absolutely.

I was once part of the artworld; in 1974, Dutton released my anthology Individuals: Postmovement Art in America, which was important at the time; it included the work of people like Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci, Bernadette Mayer, Dennis Oppenheim, Alice Aycock. But even then I was more interested in experimenting, producing, than in preparing for gallery exhibitions – although I showed at places like the Bykert Gallery, the Kitchen, Artists Space, etc. (all NY). I was an anomaly. I probably still am. Ironically, I have a major show opening at the Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles (Bergamot); this came up recently – three spaces, one of which is enormous. And I’ve been doing installations on and off, and performances. As you know I’m also working with Foofwa d’Imobilite and his dance company – I’m going to Geneva twice in the next few weeks – and we’ll use my video and soundwork and possibly images, as well as some production technology, in relation to their work. So the work gets around a fair amount at this point. But not to the degree of an established identity, not at all.

As far as the artworld is concerned, at least in this country – of course, now a major affect. It’s a way of distributing/advertising images; it is a mode of communication among artists; and more and more works are presented which reflect computer and networking technology. Painting will never disappear, but it will reappear in fact within discourse networks. All to the better! It’s an exciting time to be alive.

SM: How do you see the state of Electronic Literature/New Media Writing?How do  you see the future of writing/literature using New Media?

AS: Unlike a lot of people (I think), I see no end to writing at all. But electronic literature obviously requires technology, which means money, a power source, some minimal technical savvy. I think books are here to stay; electronic literature will be another mode of working/presenting/distributing.

There are all sorts of unexpected directions to take things. I’ve been working with short-wave, very low frequency, and other radio materials including long-wire antennas; voices and atmospheric phenomena are mixed and sorted in unexpected ways. I want to do this in the Alps. I’ve become more attuned to environmental radiations, signals, etc. This is both hi- and very low-tech. I’m not sure how it connects to writing, but it does.

You can consider it the literature of radio, literature of the earth, of all those stations interfering with one another. (On top of which, I rarely distinguish, as I think I mentioned, between one medium and another; it’s whatever is needed, present, at any one time.) ...

SM: I see you have recently started your own blog (http://nikuko.blogspot.com/) which creates a very different context for your work from your website. What made you choose to do this? I think a lot of people, especially artists, feel pressurised into blogging just to maintain online visibility due to the ‘link economics’ produced by technologies such as Google’s Page Rank and Trackbacks etc. Do you have any thoughts about the whole Web 2.0 meme that is currently in vogue?

AS: Not about the meme, but certainly there have been sea changes in the Web – moving from CERN for example through university research, home pages, ‘product communities’ and forums as well as as graphic MOOs etc., to independent communities, gaming, messaging, texting – the online world engaged in continuous expansion, interconnections, communications going nowhere and everywhere, eternal ephemera . . . Every product is a production and every production is a community.

In relation to my own work, the truth is I don’t know, in reality, how to present it, or even how to clarify what it is I do. When I perform in public – recently music as well as laptop performance – it tends to go extremely well. When I work with Foofwa d’Imobilite’s dance company in Geneva – I recently collaborated in Incidences, which is being performed all over Europe – something of a product or thing in a traditional sense emerges. When I’m online, I present part-objects, gestures, leaving it to the viewer to assemble what it is I’m doing; of course this can be only partially successful. So a blog is a way of creating the semblance of continuity. I’m torn between diaristic and presentation-modes on it, and I recognize that the format is incredibly old-fashioned, antiquated in a sense – columnar for example. I don’t have the time or energy to attempt to program within it; things just sit; the videos and other materials tend to go to http://www.asondheim.org – the usual webpage which can accommodate them.

There definitely is something to your question – maintaining online visibility is critical – but then for whom? Why? I think in the back of my mind is the notion – which is tawdry and stereotypical – that I’ll be ‘discovered’ to the extent that someone will actually pay me something for what I do (I had a taste of that in Geneva for the first time). My work is ultimately unsellable, unsalvagable.

So the blog also gives me the opportunity to create a (distorted) mirror: this might be what I do. And what I find is a constant erosion, scratching beneath the surface, recuperating the surface, for example, of the wound. It doesn’t pay the bills, but it gives me reason to ponder.

I do want to add: Web 2.0 or Web 32.0 – again this pales in comparison with what we are doing to the environment, to each other, to other species of plants and animals, to the poor among us who are increasing in numbers. I write, definitely, against this backdrop of horror, poverty, desire, sexuality, extinction, holocaust; I’m aware of it constantly. I think at least for myself, what I do has to be seen in that light. It doesn’t exist outside the maelstrom.