VEL (Blazevox, Alan Sondheim) (fwd)

[Alan Sondheim]

self-promotion



VEL


by Alan Sondheim

Product Information: POETRY
  Paperback: 120 pages
  Perfect-Bound Binding
  Size: 7.5" x 9.25"
  ISBN: 0-9759227-4-2
  Retail Price: $16.00
  blazevox.org/books/as.htm

Book Description:  A collection of codework poems written by Sondheim
while at the Virtual Environment Lab, a research center at West Virginia
University, where he visited during the summer of 2004. Baldwin says in
his intro, "Sondheim's work is important for its problematic status, as
the result of and still part of the work of digital media. As digital
writing in a strong sense, Sondheim's writing appears problematically
coded - problematic because it is decodable neither as "human-readable" or
"machine-readable" but suspended between."

http://www.blazevox.org/books/as.htm

[from] vellum, velocity: an introduction to VEL
by Sandy Baldwin, charles.baldwin at mail.wvu.edu

The dictionary tells us that VEL is an abbreviation for vellum, a
fine-grained opaque or almost-translucent parchment made from lambskin or
calfskin. Vellum is a sensuous, reflective surface. The written word is
lit up through the stretched and cured skin. VEL also abbreviates
velocity, probably derived from a Latin root for liveliness, today defined
as the rate of speed, a derivative of movement through time. The VEL in
the title of Alan Sondheim's new book VEL is the acronym for something
quite different: Virtual Environment Lab, a research center at West
Virginia University, where Sondheim visited and explored during the summer
of 2004. Sondheim's collaboration with computer scientists exploited
creative mis-use and adaptation of the technologies at the VEL, disrupting
and re-distributing built-in assumptions about the imaging and integrity
of the human body and the capture of the "real." The experiments at the
VEL, preliminary as they were, established the fascination of the problem
of "liveness" in virtual environments. Sondheim worked with clusters of
data drawn from motion capture systems to map and drive animations,
videos, texts, and other artifacts. These data clusters, in their
aggregate state as "clusters," capture motion and "life." The results are
beautiful and moving, very alien and very human, enigmatic and intimate.
Some of the writings collected here are direct results of his work at the
VEL; all were written during Sondheim's visit. And so, the meeting of
linguistic roots and corporate-strength acronym is appropriate. Sondheim
writes on the organic matter of vellum and the velocity of bodies in
motion. The technicality of being live and the already virtual velocity of
written life is very much the concern here. Sondheim's writing is best
described through his own term "codework, the computer stirring into the
text, and the text stirring the computer." So, a first take on VEL is its
relation to the computer. ... His work is opaquely illuminated by the net.


One might think of Alan Sondheim as the Joyce of our time. Too big while
he's here among us, or while we're here among him, to get our heads around
what he's done and is doing.On the other hand, it's clear he doesn't want
to be our Joyce at all, in deliberate, un-scrolling process as he is of
immolating himself, incinerating any last trace of canonical identity in a
stupendous bonfire of poetry, code, and secret philosophy. What "Joyce"
shall be left? What "Sondheim"? A monk burns in full view and the blaze
refuses to go out. We're here watching, startled and baffled, contemptuous
and titillated. That we don't quite know what fuels the seemingly mystical
act renders the transfiguration all the more unsettling and marvelous.
Kent Johnson

Sondheim's writing refreshes. Narrative or persistent personality the
reader constructs will resist. It's funny output, coded, destabilising. It
projects, expands and redirects personal need, hunger amidst insubstantial
plenty, where the real material is imaginary. Writing without purpose;
purposeful writing; not delivery of contentment or white space infill.
Writing as individuation of multipliers where what is familiar is parodic
as it is manifested, cyborgian tenacity creating its selves in process
awareness, sans merci. I is mindful of being confederated awareness.
Peripheral desiring bodies remain animal, alone and palely loitering
during downtime, mammals with machines, sensuous making intellects.
Lawrence Upton

Alan Sondheim co-founded the Cybermind and Wryting email lists online. He
is editor of Being on Line and author of .echo and Disorders of the Real.
His latest book, The Wayward, of the Salt Modern Poets books series, is
now available. He publishes widely on Net issues, and his video/sound work
is internationally exhibited. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his
partner, Azure Carter, and their cat, Boojum.

Relevant URLS:

http://www.asondheim.org/
Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm

Sondheim may be reached at sondheim at panix.com.


[ Excerpt from VEL ]


Cutting the Timber


A man lay down across the threshold of the kitchen outside, head within.
He was to represent the saw. Two players now took hold of his feet
outside, while two others caught his head and shoulders in the kitchen.
They pulled against one another, forward and backwards, as if they were
sawing wood, until one pair proved too strong for the other.

- Irish Wake Amusements, Sean O Suilleabhain, Mercier, cork, 1967, p. 82.

the ocean divides one world from another.
there is no gravity in division.
worlds bracket the ocean.
new worlds bracket old oceans and new oceans.
the horizon bends crazily with the disorientation of the wounded.
troop ships sank quickly in the frigid waters.
the _bow_ of the ship _ploughs_ a _furrow_ through the waters.
no one is present in this landscape.
no one is looking.


it is so clean i am sure you will be very happy.


_