<nettime> Interior and Absence (notes on recent work)

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Interior and Absence (notes on recent work)


In an attempt to explain my recent work...
This is such an attempt, the attempt already referenced -

Every surrounding space is non-existent, that is, every embedding space
should be construed as invisible, unless vectored outside of the frame -
i.e. perspectival vanishing-points or obvious extensions of line segments.

The invisible space is less than a frame, paregon, peripheral, only a
demarcation necessary for the transmission of the central object or
figure, or syzygy of connected nodes or interconnected figures. One must
strip away space in this regard.

Likewise one must strip away time, in order to reassemble temporality;
what it takes to see or process is widely at variance, turned loose, from
what is presented in the screen, this or that figure or figures.

Such figures descend from a series of asteroids I modeled, allowing one,
that is myself, to fly across their surfaces, as if polygons were
geological figures; it was the surround skeins, skins, that constituted
the measure of the infinite in the small, a form of perspectival geometry.

The asteroids themselves have as antecedent certain works or preparations
I constructed for scanning electron microscope imaging; these works were
either prepared natural specimens or etched figurations, sculptures
smaller than the wavelength of light, using a Cambridge Stereoscan which
did exactly that.

The concern or cathecting, investment, I have in the current objects, and
their potential or real transformations, to the extent they can be
considered objects, is based on psychoanalytic and general vectoral flows
across their surfaces - surfaces which may be penetrated or interpenetra-
ted by vision, revealing the hollowed skein or scaffolding of model
building.

The objects, whether closed manifolds or not, I consider closed manifolds
of projections and introjections, manifolds whose surfaces are inscribed
much like a cuneiform tablet, open to readings, not reading, and open to
interpretation. The reading is visceral.

The objects are not, nor are intended to be, portraits, nor do they occupy
a branch or sub-branch of portraiture; they are not singularities in
space, but spaces themselves, whose anxieties triumph, whose psychoses
play like storms across their surfaces.

I inject my concerns into safe, part-objects, transitional objects, half-
formed, maternal, wary in the construction of language, of languages, wary
in the construction of difference, differance. Such objects reference the
analogic from the digital, a digital which is embedded in the analogic, in
the hermeneutics of analogic reading and inscribing. What may for example
begin as dream or hypnagogic imagery, transforms within the pressure of
the machine, into those apparent fluidities which may be indefinitely
shaped. To shape meaning without the ostensible pressuring of language,
without the inscription of ostensible inscription - this is a goal,
meaning which, submerged, emerges, from less organized perception, which
may or may not be read as wonder in relation to the world or worlds. Every
image a world, every world, an imaginary.

The _scan_ permits the uneasy rupture/rapture among code and uncoding,
real and irreality, image and imaginary; the rupture/rapture of the scan
itself construes the fluid or abject at the heart of culture, universe,
world. Every reading is our reading; every writing is our writing; every
scan is ours and ours alone.

The _motion capture_ permits the internal tearing, torsion, tension,
tensor of the cohering body, always taken for granted, in order that
death, violence, sexuality, language, and body re-emerge as dissipated
punctum, within or without any circumscriptions.

The _access grid echo_ constructions create and reproduce the flattening
of space and thereby time that constitutes defuge, that state always
generative by deferral of other states. A face resembles, reassembles,
itself, and such contiguities or echoes are embedded as well into
generating configurations that might as well not be there.

In all of these instances, the embedding spaces are the symbolic; are the
chora; are ourselves to the extent that our senses devolve first and
primarily into the seepage of our own liquidities, bodies, sexes, deaths,
ruptured and irreparable enunciations.

The symbolic surrounds the symbol, which is symbolic to the extent, or
within, circumscription.

All inscription is circumscription.

Culture is the absence of embedding.


=====================================================

http://nikuko.blogspot.com
http://www.asondheim.org
http://www.as.wvu.edu:8000/clc/news


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