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Alan Sondheim: full/fill
About full/fill:
I've been been fascinated with the relationships among dead life, oil, oil spills, lubricants, sexuality, and commerce; this short video, with images modified and texture-mapped from BP's video cameras, captures them. The avatar is Alan Dojoji / Julu Twine - my avatars in Second Life, who behave as demiurges, video-screens, performers and creators. The music is by Azure Carter, looped and connected to various objects in the environment - including the avatar hirself.
Read and view the work here.
About Alan Sondheim:
Alan Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; he lives with his partner,
Azure Carter, in Brooklyn NY. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from Brown University
in English. A new-media artist, writer, and theorist, he has exhibited, performed
and lectured widely.
Sondheim's writings include the anthology Being on Line: Net Subjectivity
(Lusitania, 1996), Disorders of the Real (Station Hill, 1988),.echo (alt-X
digital arts, 2001), Vel (Blazevox 2004-5), Sophia (Writers Forum, 2004), Orders
of the Real (Writers Forum, 2005), The Accidental Artist (Fort/Da), Azure/Nature/Digital
(Blue Lion, 2009), and The Wayward (Salt, 2004) as well as numerous chapbooks,
ebooks, and articles. Sondheim's videos and films have been shown internationally,
most recently at Netfilmmakers (Copenhagen), UMove (NY), Subtle Technologies
(Toronto, 2009), Eyebeam (2009), and the Electronic Literature Conference (Providence,
2010). He co-moderates several pioneering email lists, including Cybermind,
Cyberculture and Wryting; Jon Marshall has published a book-length ethnography
of the first.
Since January, 1994, Sondheim has been working on an "Internet Text," a
continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body, and virtuality.
The Internet Text is coordinated with multi-media work on various websites.
In 1999, Sondheim was the 2nd Virtual Writer in Residence for the Trace online
writing community (Nottingham-Trent University, England). In 2008, Sondheim
had a solo installation and nine-month residency at the Odyssey exhibition
space in the virtual world Second Life; currently he has residencies at Humlab
(through Umea University) and East of Odyssey, in Second Life as well.
In 2004,Sondheim had a five-week residency at the Center for Literary Computing
and the Virtual Environments Laboratory, both at West Virginia University;
in 2007 he was a six-week resident of the same. In 2005 he was resident artist/writer
at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. He produced two CDs at the latter
(his older records have been reissued by ESP-Disk and Fire Museum). Two new
CDs have since appeared with FireMuseum, a vinyl record with Qbico, and another
cd with Myk Friedman for Porter Records. A new vinyl is forthcoming from FireMuseum.
In 2007, Sondheim
was also the recipient of a New Media New York State Council of the Arts grant. In
January-August 2008 Sondheimhe was on an eight-month National Science Foundation
(NSF) consultancy at WVU.
In 2001, Sondheim assembled a special issue of the American Book Review on
Codework, which was seminal in its genre; along with mez and Sandy Baldwin,
he co-edited an online issue of Leonardo. "Codework" has
been the subject of a major international workshop at WVU in April, 2008. In1999-2000,
Sondheim was second virtual-artist-in-residence in the Traceonline writing
program. In 2001 he taught New Media at Florida International University in
Miami. In 2006-07 he taught film at BrownUniversity, and recently taught humanities
courses at the School ofVisual Arts. For the past 18 years, Sondheim has worked
with the Swissdancer/ choreographer Foofwa d'Imobilite; their work has premiered
acrossEurope and the U.S. Sondheim's own laptop performances have been widely
seen; most recently he has been involved in online avatar performance with
Sandy Baldwin for live audiences in Paris, London, Basel, Portland OR, and
Providence RI.
In 2006 Sondheim had a major exhibition at Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles.
There have been other installations at the Grand Central Art Center, West Virginia
University, Arena/Uqbar in Second Life, and OCAD Hybrid in Second Life.
His research is in the art and aesthetics of codework, body and behavioral
modeling, virtual environments, and avatars in general.Current interests include
music;
aesthetics; cosmology and Buddhistphilosophy and their relation to avatars and
online environments; and experimental choreography.
Sondheim's work is archived at New York University's Fales Collection, and
Ohio State University's Avant Writing Collection, in Columbus.
Alan's Webpage: http://www.alansondheim.org
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.