Alan Sondheim
Alan Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; he lives with his
partner, Azure Carter, in Brooklyn NY. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from
Brown University in English. A new-media artist, writer, and theorist,
he has exhibited, performed and lectured widely.
Sondheim returns to WVU the week of April 18th, 2011. He will be giving a reading and talk in Colson 130 on Monday, April 18 at 7:30 p.m. His visit is sponsored by the Lane Department of Computer Science and the Center for Literary Computing in the Department of English.
Sondheim’s writings 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), The Accidental Artist
(Fort/Da), Azure/Nature/Digital (Blue Lion, 2009), The Wayward (Salt,
2004), and Deep Language (Salt, 2010) as well as numerous chapbooks,
ebooks, and articles. Sondheim’s videos and films have been shown
internationally, most recently at Netfilmmakers (Copenhagen), UMove (NY),
Subtle Technologies (Toronto, 2009), Eyebeam (2009), and the Electronic
Literature Conference (Providence, 2010). He co-moderates several
pioneering email lists, including Cybermind, Cyberculture and Wryting; Jon
Marshall has published a book-length ethnography of the first.
Since January, 1994, Sondheim has been working on an “Internet Text,” a
continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body, and
virtuality. The Internet Text is coordinated with multi-media work on
various websites. In 1999, Sondheim was the 2nd Virtual Writer in
Residence for the Trace online writing community (Nottingham-Trent
University, England). In 2008, Sondheim had a solo installation and
nine-month residency at the Odyssey exhibition space in the virtual world
Second Life; currently he has an ongoing Second Life residency in East of
Odyssey. He has just completed a Second Life residency through Humlab,
University of Umea, in Sweden; this was accompanied by a gallery
installation at the university itself. Sondheim is now working on
augmented reality pieces, to be presented in spring, 2011; he will be
speaking at E-Poetry and Dartmouth this spring, as well as working with
motion capture equipment at Columbia College in February.
In 2004,Sondheim had a five-week residency at the Center for Literary
Computing and the Virtual Environments Laboratory, under the directions of
Sandy Baldwin and Frances Van Scoy, both at West Virginia University; in
2007 he was a six-week resident of the same. In 2005 he was resident
artist/writer at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. He produced two
cds at the latter (his older recordings have been reissued by ESP-Disk and
Fire Museum). Two new cds have since appeared with FireMuseum, a vinyl
record with Qbico, and another cd with Myk Friedman for Porter Records. A
new vinyl is forthcoming from FireMuseum. Sondheim has played live in
numerous venues around New York and Philadelphia, including a recent gig
with the Vavooom Quintet, a group he organized. In 2008 he was on an
eight-month National Science Foundation (NSF) consultancy at WVU. His
research is in the art and aesthetics of codework, body and behavioral
modeling, virtual environments, and avatars in general. In 2007, Sondheim
was also the recipient of a New Media New York State Council of the Arts
grant.
In 2001, Sondheim assembled a special issue of the American Book Review on
Codework, which was seminal in its genre; along with Mez and Sandy
Baldwin, he co-edited an online issue of Leonardo. Codework has been the
subject of a major international workshop at WVU in April, 2008, organized
by Baldwin. In 1999-2000, Sondheim was second virtual-artist-in-residence
in the Trace online writing program. In 2001 he taught New Media at
Florida International University in Miami. In 2006-07 he taught film at
Brown University, and recently taught in the humanities at the School of
Visual Arts. For the past 18 years, Sondheim has worked with the Swiss
dancer/ choreographer Foofwa d’Imobilite; their work has premiered across
Europe and the U.S. Sondheim’s own laptop performances have been widely
seen; most recently he has been involved in online avatar performance with
Sandy Baldwin for live audiences in Paris, London, Basel, Portland OR, and
Providence RI. In January, 2010, Sondheim, along with Foofwa d’Imobilite
and Azure Carter, opened the season for Dance New Amsterdam in Manhattan;
this past August, he performed as part of a series at Mt. Tremper in
upstate New York. Sondheim and d’Imobilite have been working on a series
of dance/performance DVDs, including Aletsch, three disks of performances
in the Alps.
In 2006 Sondheim had a major exhibition at Track 16 Gallery in Los
Angeles. There have been other installations at the Grand Central Art
Center, West Virginia University, Arena/Uqbar in Second Life, and OCAD
Hybrid in Second Life.
Current interests include codework/texts, music, aesthetics and creation
of virtual environments and installations, cosmology and Buddhist
philosophy and their relation to avatars and online environments; and
experimental choreography.
Sondheim’s work is archived at New York University’s Fales Collection, and
Ohio State University’s Avant Writing Collection, in Columbus.
Relevant URLS:
Music archive: http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/
Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org
sondheim@panix.com, sondheim@gmail.org, tel US 1-347-383-8552
Alan Sondheim
432 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York, 11217
USA
Artist and Writer in Residency at CLC during Summer 2004
Writer and artist Alan Sondheim visited West Virginia University for a summer residency from June 2 to July 7. The visit was a collaboration beween the CLC and the Virtual Environments Lab (VEL). Take a look at an archive of work from this collaboration.
Highlights of the visit include:
—Initial research for “World Premiere: The Phenomenology of the Virtual,” a theoretical and artistic exploration of “liveness” in virtual environments.
—Development of “Plain_Text: Tools for Literary Computing,” a set of tools and texts for codeworkers and media writers.
—“Not-Doing,” a multimedia installation at the WVU College of Creative Arts Paul Mesaros Gallery. The Gallery is free and open to the public. The installation will run from June 14 to August 8.
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