Julu by Alan Sondheim


Alan Sondheim is a New York-based artist, writer and critic working
in the experimental arts since the early 1970s. Since 1995, he works
on his "Internet text" [http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/],
a body of experimental E-Mail writing with strong subjective
undertones. A hard-working artist, Sondheim composes several of these
messages per day and posts them to such arts-oriented mailing lists as
wryting, 7-11, Webartery, _arc.hive_ and Nettime.  Unlike the work of
On Kawara and other mail artists, Sondheim's writing avoids seriality
and is deeply intertwined into the software he uses, - most notably his
Unix/Linux commandline environment involving the shell, awk, grep, sed,
tr and other text-manipulation tools, but also commercial software like
Mathematica and multimedia authoring environments. Sondheim appropriates
the Unix paradigm that all data is streams of text for his writing,
merging data streams and streams of consciousness into one.  For
Sondheim's writing, computers and computer software are symbolic forms
flowing into his text itself with their sourcecode, status messages and
protocol output, a phenomenon he described in 1999 in a mailing list
discussion on the Ars Electronica award for Linux:

"Linux is art, not because it receives a prize, but because of the
aesthetics, in the collaboration, in the organism whose parts are naked
and self-evident even to those reasonably unfamiliar with operating
systems, in the ability to make and wear it like a skin crossing the
world where the Net continues to flow and stumble.  Linux in shell mode
is a potential field that appears to follow the thinking of the user;
it doesn't appear (unless one wants it to) like a carapace or graphic
superstructure. It's film-theory '68 all over again, the parameters and
articulation of the system visible, the artifice revealed, the imaginary
laid out in palimpsest.  What's more, it's not only easy to configure
(in the sense of speech), but also to program (using shell scripts,
'dialog,' etc.); if art is connected in any way with representation, one
might say that the interactive representation of linux is, if not art,
at least fashion, wearable, at problematic variance with capital (punk
for example), useful for intruders, the mouth and tongue for some of the
rest of us.

In other words, for some of us, linux _has_ changed the language."

(http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9909/msg00079.html)

In Sondheim's "Internet Text", software, as code which recursively
generates code, becomes the writer's equivalent of a musical
instrument. As with musical instruments - think about Charlotte
Moorman's video cello -, the relation to the software is intimate,
allowing him to his subjectivity in very physical, frequently sexual
ways - although he still maintains that "the commands are catalysts
for text production - not designed to deliver the final text, but to
deliver a textual body I can then work on, operate upon." 

A straightforward piece of "working" software code by Alan Sondheim is
"Julu", picked here as just one piece of his overall work. According
to Sondheim's own description, "it asks a lot of questions and
returns complex texts I can use for writing.  It has 'arrays' in it,
lists of words that it will substitute in various sentences at various
times. [...] When the program runs, it asks me to enter lines, gives me
material in return - and I write in and out of the material it gives; it
then rearranges the lines according to its own internal logic, and gives
me a text at the end."  The sourceode of Julu itself is an artistic and
literary work, and is readable to programmers and non-programmers alike.


Footnote: Just recently, net artist Lewis Lacook has written an hommage to
Alan Sondheim in software (current Flash prototype running at
http://www.lewislacook.com/alanSondheim/), a word processor/text
editor transforming all typed-in text as soon as the user hits
the "enter" key. Lacook took the inspiration from a project by Alan
Sondheim to write a text editor which would "frustrate" the writing of
the user, and implemented the idea so that text entered  will
"sometimes [...] will be replaced by a line from some
of Alan's writing, sometimes it will spatter your text in asemic strings
across the box, sometimes your text will simply disappear, and sometimes
a combination of these will happen.". The background film loop is taken
from a nude video performance of Alan Sondheim himself.


-- 
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/
http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html
GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA, finger cantsin@mail.zedat.fu-berlin.de

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