Artists’ Film Club: Alan Sondheim: Somatic Ghosting

About

Interweaving Sondeim’s practice across platforms, the lecture will explore the influence of the digital on the body and social and political spheres.

A pioneer of the virtual, Sondheim has worked for decades across music, sound and the visual. Drawing on a range of sources from his lexicon of digital objects and artefacts, this presentation will tour the territories and interzones of his practice, staking out ideas and sharing his unique perspective on our twenty-first-century conditions.

Alan Sondheim is a city-based new media artist, musician, writer, and performer concerned with issues of virtuality, and the stake that the real world has in the virtual. He has worked with his partner Azure Carter among others. Sondheim is concerned with the examination the grounds of the virtual and how the body is inhabited. He performs in virtual, real, and cross-over worlds; his virtual work is known for its highly complex and mobile architectures. He has used altered motion-capture technology extensively for examining and creating new lexicons of behaviour. His writing stems out of codework, a problematic style in which code substrates and surface content interfere with each other – in which, in other words, the textual body and body of text are deeply entangled. His current music is based on the impossibility of time reversal, on fast improvisation, and anti-gestural approaches to playing.