January 16, 2006
Meshworks
Typing Shapes Performance
"This is a streaming video of a performance I did recently at Miami University in Ohio. It gives a fairly good idea of the screen (although blurred of course compared to the original). I'm in the room, silent, responding to the audience, and typing. The typing at the bottom of the screen is live, as is my choice of materials to run. At times, there are 11-12 Qt files open at once. By choosing materials, typing, I shape the performance."--Alan Sondheim
Meshworks was performed at the Leonard Theater, 12/1/2005.
Alan Sondheim is a multi-media artist working in written text, video, sound, and image. For the past twelve years he has been continuously writing a meditation on what it means to be "online"--a meditation that has carried him endlessly in and out of language.
His readings are a kind of one-screen laptop performance; he projects the screen as well as sound. The images are from short looped videos that appear to interact with each other. He writes live text at the bottom of the screen to accompany them. The whole thing is an improvisation.
Maria Damon writes that "In performance, Sondheim, who comes from the body-art/industrial music scene of the 1970s and 80s New York City, and who is usually associated with artists like Vito Acconci and Kathy Acker, has taken issues of process so deeply to heart that each time he presents at a conference or reading he creates a spontaneous, one-of-a-kind event: he displays videos and photographs, and plays soundtracks accompanied by his live, real-time typing response along the bottom of the screen onto which the foregoing are projected. The music is his own: frantically fast guitar-playing, distorted pipe-organ drones, or other common or rare instruments recorded and warped for use in this self-ensemble. Often there are four things to look at simultaneously -- more than one of them is moving -- as well as a compelling -- overpowering, in fact -- sound component that drives the piece rhythmically." [via netbehaviour]
Meshworks: The Miami University Archive of Writing in Performance--Meshworks is a site dedicated to documenting and preserving video and sound recordings of writing in performance. The site’s title is taken from an essay by cris cheek in Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance, and Site-Specificity: “Each poetry reading is a meshwork, a gathering, of differentially inflected components.”
Posted by jo at January 16, 2006 08:03 AM
