Sondheim, Alan
7 records
I Model; You Take My Picture Bibliography
A theoretical reflection on modelling and photography arguing that representation retains a residue of organism and that the model’s body mediates power, sexuality and exchange between model and photographer; the essay examines visibility, abjection, commodification, light, shutter and camera in the production of images. The author contrasts photographic and painterly posing, invokes shamanic and erotic imaginaries, and notes accompanying computer illustrations comprising four stages of a necessarily incomplete computer portrait of a mathematical function.
Noise Culture: Thing I Bibliography
Essay titled Noise Culture situates cultural fragmentation near the turn of the millennium and defines noise culture as social turbulence fed by surplus, information overload and parasitic commodities; it cites Michel Serres, Lautreamont and Biba Kopf (Tape Delay, ed. Charles Neal) and invokes technologies and phenomena including television, video disks, computers, data-banks, computer viruses, AIDS and bureaucratic systems. The text traces consequences for memory, language, bodies, pornography, games and war, arguing that histories, identities and communicative competency dissolve into simulacra and part-objects within transnational corporate and managerial domains.
Presence of Future Presence of Video: Thing II Bibliography
Essay deriving from seminars at the New School for Social Research and SVA in New York and field trips to the American Southwest; it argues that video has become indistinguishable from everyday reality, functioning as both panopticon and membrane and transforming representation, subjectivity, gender, sexuality and the body. The author traces technological shifts—time-code, digital encoding, format changes, fiber optics, satellites, AI, solid-state storage—and their political and ecological implications, including information flows, leakages, intellectual property dissolution, and inequality driven by capital. Urban and regional effects are illustrated via colonias, maquiladoras, and transnational programming; the essay situates autopornography and domestic microelectronics within these circulations.
Theses on the Inversion of the Cinema Bibliography
A set of theoretical theses contrasting cinema and the life-world; cinema is described as a totalizing, non-linear apparatus anchored to the film reel, credits, cuts and industrial projection, while the life-world is decompressed, linear, characterized by spill, clutter and continuous movement. The text treats inscription of character, scopophilic fetishization, the flow of capital and desire, the camera as pineal gland and frame rates (16, 18, 24, 25 fps), and cites Edison and Metz. It concludes by proposing an indefinite film traversing continuous space and asserting mutual dependence of cinema and subject.
Throat Bibliography
Leslie Thornton's The Great Invisible is a film project (35 min. 16mm preliminary version, 1993; 90 min. 16mm version in process) that stages the life of Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904) through archival footage, four actresses, untranslated Arabic soundtrack sections, title cards, and references to technologies such as Edison-era phonography, railroads, and the Sony Pyxis GPS. The text recounts Eberhardt's biography: illegitimate child educated by a Russian Orthodox figure, flight to the Mahgreb at 20, cross-dressing, travels through Algerian oases, marriage to an Arab clerk, and death in a 1904 flash flood. The essay analyses cinematic strategies and themes including silencing, signifier/signified relations, neurasthenia, maternal chora, spectacle and placelessness, and notes performances by Thornton and Ron Vawter.
Towards A Primary Differentiation Between Film and Video Tools
Essay argues that film and video, though contemporaneous technologically, differ primarily in phenomenology and ontology: theater versus home viewing, film's irreversible mechanical materiality versus video's reversible electronic parameterization, rather than in quantitative resolution. It compares formats (Super 8mm, 3/4" U‑Matic, HDTV and industrial scanners up to 10,000 lines versus ~500 for commercial TV), links representational differences to psychoanalytic and narratological operations and institutional practice (Chicago Institute of Art), and lists two works: Sleazy and the Year 3000 (1987; sound by Damaged Life; woman: Marlis Schmidt) and Debrisfilm (1989; digital guitar by David Smith).
Video Bibliography
Meditative and theoretical prose on video as a medium, arguing that video fabricates light and sound, creates retrievable representational domains, and neutralizes traditional notions of truth, memory and history; it treats buffering, inscription, and virtual realities alongside political and libidinal economies. The text examines the body and fetishization in relation to television and screening, includes a short Epitaph poem, and contains sections titled Video ii, Videola and Video; it also references over four hours of videowork produced in weeks of autumn and discusses tape as an inert/active material.