My
workday is always broken up, as are my nights. I sleep poorly, I'm anxious,
depressed, almost always on edge. I fall asleep reading political theory,
physics, Dorothy Wordsworth's journals most recently. I wake up in the middle
of the night, nap during the day. I'll look at BBC news to keep up with things.
If I can't go back to sleep, I'll get up, go in the other room so as not to
wake Azure, get online and get work done. I've seen all sorts of specialists,
there are times I'm up 3-4 times during the night with day's brain-fog ahead of
me. I become ill at times because of this extreme insomnia. Most recently I've
been getting up finally between 6-10:30 a.m.
I
go into the other room, as I said, Azure may still be asleep, it's morning. She
sleeps better without me tossing and turning. I go online and begin writing. I
can write well in the early morning. I have no smartphone but have gaming
computers and a Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop that's extremely fast. All the
computers are PC or Linux; the latter are excellent older machines and I can do
a lot of work in the terminal. In fact my panix.com email address is also
through terminal and lower ASCII; this allows me 1. 1. not to be distracted
from advertising/images/etc.; 2. to process a lot of information quickly; 3. to
work in a relatively hacking-free environment; and 4. to work in an environment
where scripting and perl programming (for examples) are right there at the
prompt; I can process text or texts very quickly - for example grep allows me to
search multiple texts and directories simultaneously for words or phrases,
almost instantaneously. So I do this early.
The
rest of the day has multiple disruptions. To stay awake, I often have tv in the
background - if possible soccer (European football) games in the background; my
team, if there is one, is Barcelona, and the league I have on, La Liga. This
keeps me going, I don't have to watch, it gives me energy. Azure and I live
almost totally isolated; we have 2-3 friends here but the last time anyone
invited us over for coffee, over for dinner, even out for coffee, was well over
two years ago. We're social people, but we don't fit in, in Providence, and as
a result I feel marooned here. So noise passes for community. We're still
trying to get out.
I
should mention the noise here; there are bars downstairs, construction in the
area, motorcycle and other groups revving engines, etc.; we've had db readings
up to 92, usually around 70-80+ when things get going. The sound is erratic; we
have to use a noise machine and sometimes earplugs at night, and none of these
work well. The result is even more fractured sleep, more upset. I've been going
to doctors but haven't found a way to deal with any of this that works - pills
make me either ill or groggy, mindfulness does some good, but sudden sounds
(which happen all the time) interrupt everything. I'm concretely always stressed to the point where it's
become a clinical depression. I take nothing, try everything else.
I
write morning, noon, night, late night, etc. My other fundamental activity is
practicing music; I play a number of instruments, ranging from the Chinese
guqin to parlor guitars, sazs, flute, shakuhachi, etc. The music is all
improvised; for me it's technical. I work hardest on fretless and bowed instruments
- my bowed instruments of choice are viola and sarangi. I record my practices
and 'put up' the music online if it's good. There are also cds and lps
released, as well as some tape cassettes; they get good reviews. At last count,
something like19 to date.
The
days are chaotic for me; I'm usually exhausted most of the time. Azure will
make breakfast, I'll forage earlier. I drink coffee during the day. I have no
set schedule. I try to keep in touch with people through phone, email, etc.
We'll have lunch, usually a salad, and dinner. They're at more standard times,
but that's also variable. We eat something close to a mediterranean vegetarian
diet. I worry about wrecking Azure's schedule.
We
walk about an hour a day if we can. We look at birds, usually in the evening,
they're around We'll work together in a coffeeshop, usually Small Point, down
the street here in Providence. I need to get out of the house daily; otherwise
my depression's worse. And we travel a great deal. I really see my studio, where
I want to work, where I think well, what I think of, as being within a world or
void of Sturm und Drang, a world of elements where, for me, the
somatic and the obdurate meet and intermix, where the world is entangled with
itself. So I will play, usually a woodwind or something like a bosun's whistle,
on the edge of a cliff, or in high wind, and this becomes a video and a kind of
inspiring text of sorts. I go out in bad weather, I've been directly under a
small tornado (in Brooklyn!), in hurricanes, hailstorms and blizzards, etc.,
and these (non)events form part of my work. I tend to work in multi-media as
well as many media simultaneously, moving for example from the Second Life,
local OpenSim, and MacGrid virtual worlds, to Supercollider programs in
combination with acoustic instruments, to codework and other forms of writing;
when I have the chance (i.e. working with equipment at a place like Eyebeam in
New York or at a university like WVU in Morgantown, West Virginia), I'll use
technologies ranging from cave environments to (altered) motion capture
equipment - I need to work on the 'edges' of technology, where errors appear,
where new things are learned.
When
we hike, we look for fungi. We've found, we believe, several new species of
insects as well. We leave things where they are, document htere; we're not
collectors.
The
writing is most difficult for me; I want to write, in whatever form - poem,
essay, codework, fiction, etc., about and within foundations, producing texts
that, for me at least, have philosophical import. I'm not interested in poetry
as poetry, but as something I can inhabit, and learn from, learn from the
inhabiting. I read voraciously; every day I also go out and bring a book or two
back. At the moment I have Southey's Thalaba the destroyer here, as well as
Susskind & Frieman, Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory (I barely
'hold onto' the mathematics, but reading for as much of a general framework as
I can get), Shirer's Berlin Diary, Isabelle Knockwood's Out of the Depths, The
Experiences of Mi'kmaw Children at the Indian Residentail School at
Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia; Alexander Reid Ross' Against the Fascist Creep, and Abjection,
Melancholia, and Love, the Work of Julia Kristeva, edited by Fletcher and
Benjamin. I read Science magazine and the New Yorker regularly. I have gmail
and other email correspondence which I reply to daily. I post my work on
several email lists, including two I began over 24 years ago with Michael
Current, who died shortly after; I also post work on Facebook and YouTube. Part
of the day is working to do talks or shows or visits elsewhere; we tend to
travel a lot, which keeps me going; this year we've been in New York, Denver,
London, Acadia (Maine), Atlanta, etc.; we stay with friends (usually artists)
or relatives (my brother, Azure's parents, sometimes Azure's aunt) as much as
possible.
For
me, these aren't breaks from working, but are
working. I can work on the fly. I've always thought of myself, in a sense, in
flight, fleeing, having to work on the run. So the work goes with me, now
luckily more and more miniaturized - cameras for stills and video, small
instruments, 1-3 computers and accessories, some small books and sound
recorders, etc. When I'm somewhere else, I look and think about ways of
inhabiting that place, and what the limits of the inhabitation might be, that
becomes the core of what I'm doing. I'll theorize as well of course, that's
critical for me. When I philosophize, it's strange, I inhabit the text as if it
were a landscape, and find new directions, straight from the writing of it;
it's as if it's writing me, instead of the other way around. (So again body and
text interweave.)
For
all of this, as I've said, things are chaotic, can happen at any time. Right
now, for example, I'm wide-awake at 1 a.m.; I was up at 6 a.m. yesterday and
forget when I went to sleep, was up several times in the middle of the night,
took maybe three naps today, and always struggle. It's dark out. It's finally
silent. I can work and think well under these conditions. I remember when I was
living in Soho, I'd have a network of people - we'd talk on the phone around 3
a.m. to 4 a.m. – it felt amazing, most of the city around us asleep, we're
still going –
I
worry about growing old, when I won't be able to play music any more (I play
quickly and complexly), when I won't be able to think 'properly,' however
defined, etc. At that point I'm not sure I want to keep on living, so there's
also this horizon in the back of my mind, which I picture as a thick, dark, and
colorless curtain slowly descending. But there are also moments of great beauty
and humor, and I feel deeply that I owe so much to Azure, without her, I'd be
nowhere, lost, whether or not I was still making work. And I value the very few
friends I have now, more than anything.
When
I try to fall asleep, one other thing, other than the mindfulness exercises, I
think of mathematical objects, cubes or hypercubes or other forms, and try to
picture complicated (for me) topologies related to them, most recently looking
for all the paths across them one way or another. I also spent a year tyring to
picture four-dimensional shapes by hammering away, mentally, on extrapolations
from three dimensions, etc. I go through phases this way.
Given
that my work deals so much with the body, I'm awkward with my own; I used to do
more sexual work, but haven't for years. I've also worked with dancers at
times, most often with Foofwa d'Imobilite, who was lead (if there was one) with
Merce Cunningham. I bring this up because I was able to think of the body,
through his dancing, choreography, and company, as supple and intense in ways I
couldn't imagine before. I think that he, and I, and Azure might have made
something like 40-50 pieces together; I found what he could do absolutely
amazing. That way of working still informs me; when I've used, for example, the
Cave at Brown University, I had his choreography (among othe r things of
course) in mind.
So
maybe all of this presents something of my everyday (broken) routine; I keep
trying to impose structure, only to find my insomnia or world events or other
things breaking it down, breaking me down. If I had my way, I'd be sleeping now,
instead of writing this. But at least I think about the tides, and what the two
images accompanying this represent, what sorts of slow breathing the planet
engenders, and I'll end now, hope this is of interest to you, and hoping for
the best.
Thank
you for reading!, Alan –
Alan Sondheim is a city-based new
media artist, musician, writer, and performer concerned with issues of
virtuality, and the stake that the real world has in the virtual. He has worked
with his partner Azure Carter among others. Sondheim is interested in examining
the grounds of the virtual and how the body is inhabited. He performs in
virtual, real, and cross-over worlds; his virtual work is known for its highly
complex and mobile architectures. He has used altered motion-capture technology
extensively for examining and creating new lexicons of behavior. His current
work is centered around notions of gamespace, 'edgespace' (the border areas of
gamespace) and 'blankness,' projections around edgespace. He's been developing
a theory of semiotic splatter / splatter semiotics, dealing with fast-forward
literatures of twitter, politics, 4chan, facebook, etc. His writing stems out
of codework, a problematic style in which code substrates and surface content
interfere with each other – in which, in other words, the textual body and body
of text are deeply entangled. His
current music is based on the impossibility of time reversal, on fast
improvisation, and anti-gestural approaches to playing. His most recent work is
this short biography.
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