<nettime> living in mediaspace 0

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

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living in mediaspace 0


living in mediaspace 1 azure, foofwa, and i are living in media space. the
air is filled with electromagnetic discharge, cooling fans create a dis-
turbing hum, wires snake through the room, we're in the midst of the mach-
ine, the belly of it. living in mediaspace 2 there's no escape; the sound
and radiation continues through the night, matched only by the bleak sun-
rise and furnace roar, one toppling the other, the other toppling the one.
living in mediaspace 3 it's here we create our body movements, over and
over again, the irony of heavy labor in within the virtual, as we become
aware of big iron, even in the smallest appliance - of the need for clean
and proper protocols, as our body becomes increasingly filthy. living in
mediaspace 4 century-and-a-half old brick walls, wooden floors, skylight
and energy, wooden tables, several miles of tables, interoperability among
machines ranging from yesterday to forty years ago, analog and digital
regimes snaking into each other, patchcords and internal proprieties of
memory; we're here, turning knobs, pulling levers, plugging and unplugging
cords and cables, moving tripods, focusing cameras, aiming lights, speak-
ing, singing, walking, dancing, playing, theorizing, discussing, eating,
sleeping, excreting, shuddering, washing, dressing, typing, aligning, re-
aligning, transforming input to output, output to input, looping through
interruptions of storage media, replaying, rehearsing, recuperating. liv-
ing in mediaspace 5 my hands move across the six strings of the electric
guitar; they're not moving fast enough; when my fingers blur - then i know
something is working - something is laboring properly - the output roars
into being. living in mediaspace 6 intermittent taking of digital photo-
graphs through the obdurate regime of the real: everything returns to the
virtual; we're leaving our traces. living in mediaspace 7 thus tracing our
cords - where does this one or that one go - following the line snaking
among hundreds of others to the obverse side, interior, of the device or
patchbay: they go on with three switches half-buried among distribution
amplifiers and sync generators. living in mediaspace 8 the day is ready
when the machines are ready; some remain on, alert and vigilant through
the night; some sleep uneasily; some keep their clocks right on time. liv-
ing in mediaspace 9 we are sure to be activated; there's no uncertainty;
the bricks glow with data bombardment; we're becoming suffused; there's
not a moment to lose; the machines are waiting, tapes and disks running;
other storage media as well; there's always flash memory, wetware; the
room pulses to a single sync; you can almost hear us living in mediaspace
10; you can almost hear us breathing


__


Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt 
Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html
Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm
CDROM of collected work 1994-2000/1 available: write sondheim@panix.com

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