BEING ON-LINE
A Conversation with Alan Sondheim

Alan Sondheim [sondheim@panix.com] is a writer, teacher, and cyberspace
theorist who co-moderates four Internet email lists: Cybermind,
Fiction-of-Philosophy, E-conf, and Cyberculture. He has recently edited
_Being On Line, Net Subjectivity_ (New York: Lusitania Press, 1997), and
guest-edited _New Observations on Cultures of Cyberspace._ URL:
http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt

Joel Weishaus has published extensively as a poet, editor, experimental
writer, and art critic. He presently lives in Albuquerque, NM, where he
is engaged in a five-year on-line net.art/neuroscience project, "Inside
the Skull-House," metaphorically mapping the human brain. In 1998, The
University of New Mexico granted archival status to his web site:
http://www.unm.edu/~reality.

+ + +

Joel Weishaus: I have the impression of a dark genius quartered in a
Brooklyn loft strewn with books and glowing on-line monitors,
occasionally grabbing a laptop to travel and lecture around the world.
However, as I only know you in cyberspace, can you draw a picture of
where, and why, you are physically situated.

Alan Sondheim: Except for the 'genius' it's probably true, although I
appear more Rabelaisian and arrogant in real life, the result of
scar-like layers of defensive strategies. The loft overlooks Flatbush
Avenue, Dean Street, Fifth Avenue, and Atlantic Avenue, in other words a
confluence of streets. And I work mainly at night among the books,
musical instruments and some video equipment as well - various
extensions of myself through various media. At night I feel I'm on a
useless ship in space, going nowhere, teetering on the edge of chaos,
literally. And trying to keep depression away, so that the texts don't
become contaminated by my own personal neuroses, problems, what have
you. There's a dimness to the world I want to avoid in my writing.

I write also to avoid death; although that's trite, it figures literally
with me. My fears disappear if I create the cornerstone of what I see as
a 'reasonable text.' Beyond that, given the circumstances of my writing,
I find myself lifted away from the body (net sex will return me to it,
even though that is virtual enough); I am more of an emanation for
myself, than present in any sort of physical fullness. I also feel that,
as I've written many times, I write myself into existence and write
myself out of existence. So that the writing is _critical_ for me to
stay alive, absolutely critical. If I have a day without writing, I have
a day that 'disappears me,' and I'll do anything to avoid it. The
existence I'm written into, write myself into - I want to examine that,
scratch away at surface after surface.

JW: When I was a teen I lifted weights at a YMCA gym on Atlantic Avenue.
There, too, a few firemen kept in shape, one of whose left biceps were
morbidly locked into a fully flexed position, its tendon having become
permanently shortened. That muscle (I remember it was the left, as I'm
left-handed), unable to stretch and relax, stood to me as a symbol of
somatic zealotry. Not a strange position for someone whose job
description often put his life on the line!

It seems to me that the fear of non-existence, which you keep at bay by
continuously pumping out words that serve to displace your temporal
corporeality by "speaking precisely in the name of this nothingness," as
Blanchot put it, is, becoming ever more acute. There are many reasons
for this, including sophisticated prosthetics, digital-based virtual
worlds, cloning, and unstable archival/retrieval systems. Do you see
your plight, then, as a sort of futuristic archetype?

AS: Not really, except that digital existence requires continuous
maintenance: stop writing, and the character disappears and/or doesn't
develop. The character is entirely constituted, and to the extent that
I'm represented within the digital, I'm entirely constituted as well -
at least my imagination is. Your description seems more like that of
catatonia - that locking - and I feel much more porous, mobile,
transforming. I'm not sure I'd use the word "plight" either - that
implies an illness at the core of things. I think for myself neurosis is
a driving factor, but not at the core; I wish to keep it away from there
- i.e. don't feel that my work is either symptomatic or a symptomalogy.
Perhaps instead of the fear of non-existence, it's in an odd way a
celebration of replete or too much existence, too many chiasms,
interpenetrated ontologies, epistemological flows. Where Jennifer ends
(one of my emanations) and I begin is a region, not a line.

JW: Before getting to Jennifer, one of the characters your transmissions
tender, I'd like to orient to your work on Internet theory, which, I
understand, is central to your current aesthetic. I'm curious as to
where you would, in a cultural sense, trace its threshold.

AS: In my own work–you would find a kind of presencing and a disruptive
imaginary, both of which relate to virtual subjectivity, going all the
way back; in the early 70s for example I did a series of collapsed
hypercubes (made from cord) that topologically retained their
connectivity as three-dimensional projections, but visually appeared as
entanglements. So they were present, but what was visible was only a
dream of four-dimensionality, as if there were a virtual space within
which the visual would be perceptually coherent as well.

There has always been the haunting of an Other in my work. In my
videotapes dealing with sexuality, there is often a woman's voice,
sometimes accompanied by her on-camera as well, looking away; I may be
naked, responding to her voice, but she operates as an autonomy
elsewhere–as a virtual subject more real than I am in a way.

For me, existence may be a disease mitigated only by writing, by dreams,
by alterity, by the virtual. Jennifer was born of that. At the same time
I want to point out that Jennifer is not a local symptom, but an
analytical or experiential emanation for understanding subjectivity in
general.

JW: Could you elaborate on the dynamics of generalizing an emanation,
especially when it comes to the Internet?

AS: I realized early on that in relation to "concrete knowledge,"
however defined (I would use mathematics as a basis here), I have little
to contribute; I also realized early on that, with unsolvability theory,
etc., there are theoretical limits - as well as practical ones - to
"one's" knowledge of the world. This was brought home to me in a systems
group I was part of at Brown, I think the late 60s–one report was on
the fact that as AI approached mimicry of the mind in very limited ways,
the programs themselves quickly became unmanageable; what went on in the
computer, state by state, was increasingly unknowable. In other words,
the more "x" models (and only models) mind, the less "x" itself is
knowable; it's the beginning of an infinite regress. So I became
interested and involved in the interstices - how does consciousness deal
with knowledge, how do symbols interact with the mind - how do desire
and the "I" and the (metaphoric) "eye" figure into all of this? Now
whatever consciousness Jennifer "has" (and is consciousness ever in the
state of a _possession?_), is obviously "my" consciousness of course.
But through her, such a consciousness, such a "being" (in the sense of
organism), can interact with her environment in a way I couldn't
otherwise - for instance, Jennifer on a MOO parallels myself as virtual
being on a MOO and allows me to explore a dispersed consciousness as
well - for example I might have Jennifer and Julu interacting (which I
often do).

On a personal level, Jennifer may function as (Oskar) Kokoschka's or
(Hans) Bellmer's "dolls," that is, as a way to keep up a loving
conversation with myself; I live alone, my friends are of course very
wrapped up in their own lives, and my isolation tends to the extreme.
Jennifer and Nikuko and Julu and the others allow me the comfort and
production of conversation; recently, for example, I wrote a short text
about the bombing of Iraq through "Timmy's" eyes, which gave me the
ability to see things I might not have been able without "him."

With these emanations, I've been able to explore such issues as
performativity in language, virtual sex and virtual sexualities. I've
developed the concept of a "textual unconscious" written by an other
into the self; through lag, holding-back, description, and command, it
can place one in an almost hypnotic state that's sexually and
emotionally overpowering.

From this work, I've gone on to think of "s/ms," miniaturized
sado-masochisms which work as either couplings or linkages. A coupling
is looser than a linkage; if one element is changed, the other need not
be. But a linkage implies just that - and the change in one element,
changes them all. Out of these you can create "part-objects" or partial
representations, playing off the imaginary; these coagulate, and as such
form the avatars or emanations. Of course, in a certain way, the real
itself is an imaginary; my theory work plays off this. And as I said,
there is also the personal element; the avatars appear with infinite
depth; they're viral companions, in a sense, as if capable of anything.

JW: Bellmer's dolls, their limbs hinged, could be arranged and
re-arranged into myriad attitudes, "inventing all desires." You also
make me think of when, after having an interesting conversation with
someone, the conversation usually continues in my head with the person
having become an autonomous imaginary construct of my imagination. This
seems to be a common experience, and a particularly creative one. But
seeing through an emanation's eyes, as you do, is more Stanislavskian,
as you create a character from the inside out.

AS: Or the character creates me; one thing I deal with is author/ity,
responsibility, the ethos of multiplicity. In one sense, I know all
there is to know - in another sense nothing. I should note that the work
has a certain danger or dis/comfort for me as well; if I create a text,
for example, that makes me ill-at-ease, that's usually a sign I'm on the
right track. If I'm writing myself in and out of existence, I'm also
doing it through these other identities, which are given, at lest
formally, full reign.

JW: I'd like to shift here to the stage on which your avatars play. I
became interested in the Internet as a place to gather research, as a
channel for communication with colleagues, and, more recently, as an
archival, and publishing, venue. From a graphics standpoint, there was
for me a progression from an interest in Video Art (I was a museum
curator), to "Cyberart," to "net.art."

AS: I've made video and curated video, both a lot, and continue to think
through video issues and make video from time to time. "net.art" has
always bothered me; I associate it with some of the artists on nettime,
and it has a politics unto itself which is interesting in the manner it
attempts to engage both the cultural and the political (not to imply a
split). I'm not sure what "Cyberart" is. I tend in my own work simply to
move from what others call various media, but to me seem just instances
of practice and praxis - I'd rather let it go at that. I certainly don't
think the Net is any utopian answer to the _situation_ or moment of art;
in fact, it so far has had to bypass the "grain of the real" (out of
Barthes here) - and I can look at painting today with a continuous new
eye and sense of wonder, as always, just as I can look at the latest
jodi.org (www.jodi.org) spew. I mean this in a positive way.

JW: Cyberart, or Computer Art, is art made with a computer, the final
medium usually a color print. The Cyberart term is obscure, as it kind
of snuck in late, as a premonition of cyberspace as we know it today.

AS: From what I know of your work, you usually stay pretty much at the
low end of hi-tech, with "older coding," your interest–you said
somewhere–being in a ubiquitous accessibility, although you obviously
know what's happening at sites that use the latest bells & whistles.
What are your hopes for the future of the Net with reference to
communication, and your fears when it comes to commercialization?

AS: I've used programs going back into the 80s, but I also have used the
latest Perl and a current websuite (Corel) for my work. It's a mix; I
just don't favor any one over the other, nor do I stay within
applications - anything I do, whether text or image, is likely to have
been bounced all over the place. The Linux I use is current; it's
fascinating to follow its development as a more and more integrated and
accessible operating system.

I don't have hopes or fears re: the Net. I talk about a future "seamless
virtual reality" paralleling our own presence in the world; the major
difference being a safe-word to get us out of it. For all I know we may
be in one now, the safe-word forgotten, its memory erased. But that is
only one future, of course. I don't think, past the next 2-3 years, one
can predict anything. For example, the way push technology so quickly
disappeared, or the fact that cable modems still aren't widely
available. The commercialization of the Net is a fact, and in the long
run, I think it will make very little difference. At the moment it
appears a problem, especially against the backdrop of the ethos of the
earlier text-based Net, but people are accommodating remarkably fast. I
think most people will continue to remain rather ignorant of history (of
the Net, of the world in general), and this ignorance, if anything, is
increasing in depth. I also think most people will continue to "nest" in
some of the applications they find when they first log on - "favorite"
chat-sites and so forth. But I don't have any great fears about any of
this - or great hopes either. For that matter, I think that the
relationship of any of this to the nation state itself is still unknown.

JW: Last year you made an extended trip to Japan. Did you find anything
there moved you in an unexpected direction?

AS: I find a certain quietude at the heart of things by projecting
myself backwards through (non-state) Shinto and Heian aesthetics; I
found also for the first time a place/site to write, for which I have
been grateful. It was living in Japan, not so much an extended trip - in
other words, I felt both comfortable and uncomfortable. The unknown
kanji created a matrix into which I could theorize certain ideas of the
symbolic, all the while keeping my ignorance foregrounded… You might
check my _The Case of the Real_ and the Nikuko texts
(http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt) - they all came out of this
recognition of an impermeable knowledge. I'm not talking about
Orientalism whatsoever, but simply that an inability to comprehend even
the ideogrammatics, graphemes, of a culture imposes an odd sort of
self-reflexivity back onto one, and my work, in analyzing that, was also
dealing with the symbolic's relationship to consciousness, and issues of
both ontology and epistemology. And there was also this gift of "time"
and "space" as I said to write within - most of my life I have been
nomadic, theorizing on the run (maybe the theory of internal exile
(vis-a-vis Quebecois thought)) - in Fukuoka, precisely because of
ignorance, I was able to fasten on these topics.

JW: As the ideograph successfully addresses the problem of wedding word
and image, the nature of which is important to the design of web sites,
and thus to electronic textual endeavors, could you expand a bit on your
theory of kanji as a matrix of the symbolic?

AS: It's not so much the kanji per se as its ubiquitous appearance; for
someone who can't read the symbols, they become granular, not
transparent - so the world appears articulated by signifiers which
captivate/encapsulate the subject within the matrix. I wouldn't want to
push the idea of kanji as ideogram since there have been so many
transformations of the signs that there is often a deep illegibility in
terms of pictographic reference. Some of the simpler ones are readable
in terms of image, even to a foreigner like myself who isn't familiar
with the language; almost all of them are at a distance, however,
requiring brute memorization in terms of _on_ and _kun_ readings and
combinations.

JW: _On_ and _kun_?

AS: The Chinese reading is _on_, the Japanese reading is _kun_;
ideograms have both and often multiples.

JW: If the complex signifier demands sophisticated mnemonic abilities -
with this in mind, could it be that computers offer an ironic symbiosis,
with the machine having more available memory than its operator? In
addition, while the aging human brain is busy shedding millions of its
neurons, a computer's RAM can be easily upgraded. Are we irrevocably
moving in the direction of autonomous robotic bodies, with such
Gibsonean prosthetics as plug-in memory chips? Is this the only possible
biological future for humankind, our logical line of flight?

AS: I don't think that the brain and computer are remotely equivalent in
terms of processes, both quantitatively and qualitatively. I subscribe
to the notion that the brain operates at least partially through quantum
processes; there is also fairly clear evidence at this point for neural
regeneration as well as synaptic growth throughout one's life.

I'm not sure how one would measure "available memory" in the brain,
actually - one can measure speed of operations, which doesn't go very
far (and is of course vastly slow), but not much else. I wouldn't say
necessarily _robotic_ bodies, but certainly computers will outgrow
humans in measurable intelligence; that's got to be only a matter of
time. I can even envision emanations more creative and measurably
intelligent than their originators, Jennifer and Julu and Nikuko
enfolding for example. Within, say, two decades.

JW: This seems in line with Gerald Edelman's argument that, unlike
computers, the brain is subject to morphic evolution, and thus more
superficial comparisons are specious. There is some evidence for neural
regeneration, but whether we lose more than we gain hasn't yet been
ascertained. After all, the brain does shrink with age. Size in relation
to intelligence is currently being debated. One argument being made that
size has more to do with _expertise_ than with I.Q.

By "available memory," I mean what's available as instant recall, as
compared with a computer's RAM. Of course, as you point out, the brain
works differently, and infinitely more creatively, than does an OS.
Although this may change if and when quantum computers, or chemical
computers, are developed. I understand that scientists are trying to
develop both concepts. I find what neuroscientists have been discovering
about the human brain more interesting than most science fiction, as is
the potential of the Internet for creative innovations. Thus, in
closing, could you dream a bit for us, and gestate a vision of humanity
in the next century living in the caches of the Web?

AS: Usually what I talk about is "seamless virtual reality," and for an
example, I say just look around us now - if we only knew the
_safeword,_ the _keyword,_ we'd be back in the real world - in the
meantime we're stuck with this. This is a real possibility with
constantly exploding bandwidth; more likely, we'll be entangled in some
monstrous corporate enterprise, with advertising banners all over the
place, as if we were permanently living in Times Square. Or a third
possibility, that we'd be bound by our own sexual energies, eternally
fulfilled - until the money's gone…

+ + +

WORKS CITED

Blanchot, M. Quoted by G.L. Bruns, _Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of
Philosophy_. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. P.44

Edelman, G.M. _Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind._ New
York: BasicBooks, 1991.

Gibson, W. _Neuromancer_. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

SEE ALSO:

Black, Ira B. _Information in the Brain: A Molecular Perspective._
Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1991.

Denning, Peter J. and Metcalfe, Robert M. eds. _Beyond Calculation: The
Next Fifty Years of Computing._ New York: Spring Verlag/Copernicus,
1997.

McCullough, Helen Craig. _Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology._
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Moravec, Hans. _Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind._ New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999.