Bio
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.”
Alan Sondheim's books 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), and The Wayward (Salt, 2004) as well as numerous other chapbooks, ebooks, and articles. His video and film have been widely exhibited. Sondheim co-moderates several pioneering email lists, including Cybermind, Cyberculture and Wryting. Since January, 1994, he has been working on an "Internet Text," a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body, and virtuality. In 1999, Sondheim was the 2nd Virtual Writer in Residence for the Trace online writing community (Nottingham-Trent University, England).
In 2004, he was a 5 week resident of the Center for Literary Computing and the Virtual Environments Laboratory at West Virginia University, and in 2005 he was resident artist/writer at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. He produced to soundwork CDs at the latter (his older records have been reissued by ESP-Disk and Fire Museum). In 2001, Sondheim assembled a special issue of the America Book Review on Codework, which was seminal in its genre. Sondheim taught in the Trace online writing program; in 2001-2 he also taught new media at Florida International University in Miami. He is currently working with the Swiss dancer/ choreographer Foofa d'Imobilite on a series of works. Sondheim's work is trans-media; his emphasis is on writing, theory, and digital performance.
Relevant URLS:
- http://www.asondheim.org/
- WVU 2004 projects http://www.as.wvu.edu/clcold/sondheim/files/
- recent related to WVU http://www.as.wvu.edu:8000/clc/Members/sondheim
- Trace writing projects http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/