There are still a lot of issues we should address regarding the video – choreographed movement balance, as we have mentioned before. These notes from Alan Sondheim provide some glimmers of insight in that regard, for the piece seems to be a highly multimedia environment, split personas, a bit more virtual-real than we were discussing but actually very parallel to the discussion on duality of identity… the video element is actually important to think about as this multiplicity, representation thereof…!

(Final) Frontier

I like to believe I’m working on a frontier and all I can tell you is what’s on the normative side of things; the rest is yet to be seen, unabsorbed. Once brought in from the Pale, it’s of lesser interest, but beyond the Pale there’s nothing but the agony of shadows. Defuge takes over and the frontier, always an imaginary, shudders and reconvenes.

The videos/choreographies exist between human and human —- someone was there making the original files with motion capture, and someone is at the other end, watching and using them once again. The virtual is a shadow of the real, the real is a shadow of the virtual, and within the true world superimpositions, gestures, and the fading of ontologies characterize what remains of the fixity of inscriptive practices of the classical and modern ages.

Distinctions are blurred through embedding and filtering. Avatars and humans —- together, emanents —- are embedded in online virtual worlds, in spaces which are simultaneously physical/inert/analog and virtual/mobile/digital. Every seeing, every being, is a filtering; existence and copula are interwoven. A current collection of texts is called Messays; in a Messay, there’s no leading sentence, no orderly sequence of ideas, no summings-up, no conclusions. The essay is to classical narratology as the messay is to future true world genres which seep into one another, headless and tailless – meandering on the one hand, problematic obeisance to protocols on the other.

What we started with is the body which is inscribed with scars, scratches, tears, wounds, blemishes, abrasions, cuts, and all other debris carrying analogic history into the symbolic. What we continued with are tattoos, incisions, fashion, gesture, languagings, and what continually emerges is the body harboring technology as self retreats or withdraws, puckers, from the wild symphonics of externally-applied filters digging ever deeper.

The walk or arm-swing becomes gesture becomes anysign becomes trade-off, translation, transformation, exchange, interoperability, reified territorialization. One sits at a console and breathes through sheave-skin, another begins vortex stage-center with flesh-electric, a third wanders memory of others airless, unbreathing, peripheral wanderings mediated at mind’s back. From the airless, flesh-breathers are attracted, gather, project and introject, their selves flowing, flooding, abjecting, full of scent and coagulation.

We take our tiny community of people up and down mountains, in and out of clubs and iced fields, across the chiasm of cut bodies and body cuts, mines and other extractive industries across the flesh of land and bodies. What we bring back is always new, even if only in the slightest detail, a brush of the hand or turn of the head that was never seen before. And we keep to our goal of understanding filtering and embedding better than before, and understanding bodies in the always future anterior world, the true world of emanents and anysign where we’re living, breathing, writing and wryting, this and any future day.

Almost every avatar you see represented is a composite of two people; if you see two avatars engaged with one another, the engagement is contiguous at best, and each avatar is itself a composite. The composites are male and female; they reflect and murmur other in relation. Two are four, four are eight, eight are sixteen. Or more, depending on the configuration of motion-capture, the independence of minds and intentions.

Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, the Imaginary:

“In the sense given to this term by Jacques Lacan (and generally used substantively); one of the three essential orders of the psycho-analytic field” […]

[…] “Lacan brought forward the idea that the ego of the human infant – as a result, in particular, of its biological prematurity – is constituted on the basis of the image of the counterpart (specular ego).

Bearing in mind this primordial experience: we may categorize the following as falling into the Imaginary:

a. from the intrasubjective point of view, the basically narcissistic relation of the subject to his ego;

b. from the intersubjective point of view, a so-called _dual_ relationship based on —- and captured by —- the image of a counterpart (erotic attraction, aggressive tension). For Lacan, a counterpart (i.e. another who is me) can only exist by virtue of the fact that the ego is originally another.” […]

Thus simultaneously a space of mirroring and of singular constitution, a space of a real and an evanescence. In Second Life, objects are constituted in relation to a well-ordered data-base, without which the enumeration of potential behaviors, constructions, and wanderings would be impossible.

“another who is me” – another always is me, neither constitutive nor part-and-parcel. One leaps on the page to “Incorporation”: “Process whereby the subject, more or less on the level of phantasy, has an object penetrate
his body and keeps it ‘inside’ his body.” Etc. etc., more or less. One might argue that it is always incorporation, that the world is world by virtue of _devouring._ I would ask, who pulls the strings, moves the sensors, whereby one has been two, two murmur one, in these image of behaviors that are simultaneously inconceivable, and at the root of every narrative?

It doesn’t stop there; the avatars are the result of filtered behavior, filtered in such a way that f(n) does not equal 1, i.e. is not transparent, but in fact transforms behavior into caricature that gnaws at the body, representative and within a primordial gnawing, if you like. (This filtering occurs in the transmission/reception stage of raw sensor data
turning towards coherent representation. Filtering is mobile, perhaps system noise, more likely hacking or rupture, the dim imaging of presence unaccounted-for. Any reception is filtered —- I’m arguing for yet another stage in the communications model, existing in those liminal interfaces among block-diagram entities and arrows.)

Table 5, Eco’s theory of codes in A Theory of Semiotics – the Watergate (hydraulic) Model interpreted in relation to expression and content planes. But framed on the left: “Continuum / Light, electric phenomena / Non-semiotic matter” and on the right: “Continuum / the unshaped continuum of the position of the water along with everything one can think about it / Non-semiotic matter.” One discretely cuts surgically within the analogic which remains impervious, bounding; a discrete cut cuts discretely, constructs difference across fissure, that is operates within and constructs
inscription. Isn’t the world such an inscription? Let us think of non-semiotic matter as _dark matter_ to be brought within the fold (pli).

Selves are located, others and an others are located, between these matters, which are all that matter, out of which the drawing-forth is temporary at best. Nagarjuna has no position and this positionlessness is as close as one can get.

The doubled figures within the figures of the avatars you see projected on the screen, live or in careful reproduction, are uncanny; they appear in documentary footage to be completely independent, but by virtue of the sensors are connected, as in Bell’s theorem, in such a manner as a fractured _monother_ or entity is produced. Conflicting forces are combined without effect or affect traveling among them: there is no resolution, only tearings as the image-monother accommodates them all. Think of the movements as _catatonic sex-dances_ or rites of passage held in position precisely by those noisy channels which, parasitic, spew culture in otherwise dull transmissions. A catatonic sex-dance is a molding or ingestion, incorporations, of others in order to form selves (an ‘adult’ is an entity whose flesh is carved into the semblance of a human being). A dance is called ‘sex-dance’ if it is dual; it is also ‘corporation-dance,’ ‘money-dance,’ ‘incorporation-dance,’ ‘culture-dance,’ ‘death-dance.’ Sheave-skins generate nothing internally but imaginaries; externally, they generate internals. Think of the monother as worlding, the mapping of external universes onto, within, small finite spaces which appear coherent, the mapping cohering. The dance, like that of bees, is of course any communication, established or not, channeled or not; one might think of beings inhabiting monothers in such a way that their touch is full, replete, of one another. What you see on the screen may appear both tired and strange, but it is also a model of the true world within which monothers characterize life and lives, living, inhabitations, habitus. (Think of the ‘it’ in ‘one going it alone.’)

You have to look for the specific discrete levels, nodes, configurations, on the expression plane – all of which are moving at high-speed —- but you _must_ look, drawing forth a narrative, which, like all others, is yours
and yours alone and ties, however uncomfortably, the appearance of beings into Being. You have to see monothers shimmering among modes of existence, ontologies, for example, movements among rocks and cliffs and movements
among intended rocks and cliffs, deferring among intentional/configured ontologies, and those which are mute, inert, idiotic. Or divide the catatonic sex-dance into substance-catatonia (misnomer and oxymoron to boot) and inscription-sex-dance (the same, the other boot, terms booting monothers into the arena).

Now you’re getting closer to the relationship among inscription, code, substance, communication, &tc, and further might bring you permanently, like a matchmaker.com, into collusion from collocation, where contiguity and contingency meld and something permanently unnameable emerges, where Nagarjuna’s grasping, samsara, appears:

” When there is a grasping, the grasper

Comes into existence.

If he did not grasp,

Then being freed, he would not come into existence. “

(The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika, translation and commentary Jay L. Garfield.)

Let them go at that.

[taken from nettime, Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:38:20 -0400 (EDT)]