<nettime> Eros and Logos in Second Life, Erasure / Manque in Second Life

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

(please post soon, the files can't remain up, thanks, Alan)


Eros and Logos in Second Life
Erasure / Manque in Second Life


Quickly the installation disappears, objects deleted or returned to
database. Deletion is absolute; in spite of appearances, virtual worlds
have no memory. Digital bits are always negotiable, and what is gone is
annihilated; even energy disappears. Scripts never return - they simply
have never been, image/video evidence to the contrary. It is all
constructible beneath the sign of capital; eliminated, there is another
sign, that of genocide or the Phaistos disk.

http://www.alansondheim.org/okamiierasure.mp4

Earlier, these happened, as if eros had anything but a formal role to
play. Listen carefully and a voice asks the expense of another skin,
against impossible odds of sexuality manifest anywhere other than the
articulated apparent membrane of the body. Someday this will change, and
felt constructs will replace visual animations. But think about this as a
reversal, and retroactive: think of skin and sexuality now, as already
gone, or the production of something organic in a vastly ancient world.
We're tumbling towards that, doing everything we can to speed things up:
annihilation to the limit, or, as the world dies, to the limitless.
There's no technological future, none organic. These dancing figure are
simulacra, already ghosts, unrealizing before their virtual, and real,
worlds disappear forever.

http://www.alansondheim.org/okamii.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/okamii2.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/okamii3.mp4

It always seems, even in the midst of artificial passion, suicidal, the
gibbering of membranes without thought: we have never thought, in fact or
otherwise. Look at the despair with which one grasps the last of
Wittgenstein's Tractatus, as if mysticism somehow opens a gate. But the
gate is gateless, a zen without recourse or koan, without the poetics of
mysticism. Grown up, we can read Philo again as godless, someone finding
meaning everywhere, someone always trying. There are others trying
slaughter on for size.

It is remarkable how the _bending back_ of an ikon or avatar constructs
an offering, sexualized but beyond the Pale. No one is the victor in these
encounters; everyone arises aroused, just before the erasure of the world.





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