ALAN SONDHEIM

{ nikuko } alan sondheim { jennifer }

THEORY, CODEWORK, LINKS TO MULTI-MEDIA WORK, COMMENTARY

AB - To blog or not to blog, this is the question…

AS - They - "they" keep moving up the Web, now 3.0 here - more and more transparency and greater and greater interconnectedness. It's wonderful that community is augmented; I do worry about the relation of all of this to critical theory's "massification" - what's being lost in negotiation of denominators on a continuous basis? Blogs are updated homepages with the potential for reply of course. I find them a reasonable mode of distribution and peregination, but I haven't had the time to work on mine as much as I'd like. I do think for the most part that email lists are dead, but I don't think that email per se is dead - it remains the best way for thoughtful private communication...

AB - How would you characterize your blog you should describe it to one of us, i.e. another blogger?

AS - An artwork which has to catch up with itself.
It has to remain sexually clean and therefore self-censorable.
It hides from the public.
It's always already written by someone else.

AB - I sometimes regard my blog as a safe place where I can meet my chosen people, is this the same for you?

AS - No - I don't think there are safe places any longer, anywhere, online or offline. When I turn the machines off and play an instrument - that appears safe, especially an acoustic instrument which takes me off the grid. On the grid - and the grid is so frail! - nothing is safe, everything is open, again for negotiation. The loss of the individual in such negotiations opens the way towards negotiated, mass, ethos as well, which is problematic to the extreme.

AB - I am wondering do we sometimes forget that personal remarks, notes, poems are there for everybody to be seen?

AS - I never forget that. I've been attacked so much online - most recently for three and a half weeks on nettime - that I'm quite aware of audience - and audience that may be insufferable. But even with my smallest silliest work, I recognize a priori the presence of audience; in a sense, there's no other reason to put up anything, except for communication.

AB - Do you post many poems on your blog? Is there an actual difference in-between publishing online, mainly through a blog, or printed publishing?

AS - Yes, there's a difference of intimacy. But with my work, I don't really know what constitutes a poem and what doesn't. At the moment I'm not posting much to the blog, but when I do, I see it as a continuous stream of writing, écriture....

AB - What kind of actual or immaterial feedback do you receive from publishing online through a blog?

AS - Just about nothing, occasionally someone writing that they like this or that. Almost no comments in the commentary. At one point I had to restrict the commentary to people who "signed up" - I was being spammed. Ah well, I wish I could be more optimistic...

AB - What do you think of the Blogosphere when related to blogs that deal with poetry?

AS - What do you mean by "Blogosphere"? Do you mean the entirety of blogs as a collocation, phenomenon, grouping? The question might be, what's the relation of culture to poetry, online culture to poetry (online or offline), etc. Poetry is increasingly "minor" - I thought online venues would lead to real internationalism here, but it hasn't. It's a place with the potential for close community, the same as might come to a reading.

The "Blogosphere" seems connected with personal/political opinion, and at least in the popular press, there are constant issues of veracity and readership. Both oddly seem unrelated to tiny art-projects such as my own.
 

I hope this helps. After the nettime fracas, I've been feeling that hatred and linguistic violence have just moved to another sphere. There's kindness on the net of course, but things are far too often shrill, as shrill and damaging as real life...