New Release Books by Alan Sondheim

Alan Sondheim's Writing Under explores and examines what happens to writing as it takes place on and through the networked computer. Sondheim began experimenting with artistic and philosophical writing using computers in the early 1970s. Since 1994, he has explored the possibilities of writing on the Internet, whether using blogs, web pages, e–mails, virtual worlds, or other tools. The sum total of Sondheim's writing online is entitled “The Internet Text.” Writing Under selects from this work to provide insight into how writing takes place today and into the unique practices of a writer. The selections range from philosophical musings, to technical explorations of writing practice, to poetic meditations on the writer online. This work expands our understanding of writing today and charts a path for writing's future.

THE ACCIDENTAL ARTIST was an ongoing exhibition in Second Life at Odyssey, June 2008 - January 2009, by Alan Sondheim, with help from Sugar Seville, Azure Carter, Gary Nanes, Sandy Baldwin, and Frances van Scoy at the Virtual Environments Laboratory, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia. The show changed daily and the gave me an opportunity to study the phenomenology of a virtual world in relation to avatar-human objectivity. The following texts were written during the generation of the show.

A series of short texts or poems that revel in structured and unstructured language, with all the gaps and excitement that happens when language is stressed to the limit.

Poetry. It takes a machine to unscroll the infinite scroll, speak the infinite names of gods and goddesses, make the paper and papyrus and phonograph and calculating engine in the first place. It takes a machine to make the machine. The book is hardly the first machine. Alan Sondheim's THE CASE OF THE REAL discusses virtual subjectivity in relation to the physical real: who, or what, are the subject and object? Do these terms have relevance in universes of information and desire? THE CASE OF THE REAL is a case in point. Saddlestapled chapbook.

This collection of writing represents, in Sondheim's words, "a basic text for postmodern poets." Sondheim states, "My approach would describe something like the impossible search for the grounds of the Self in sexuality and ideology; the hysteria of the loss of speech; a work situated between poetry and theory that extends the boundaries of theory itself; 'the poetry of deconstruction'; 'the narrative of loss' ..."

The Wayward is an exploration into virtual life and theory. It uses tools from codework to traditional genre; much of its work is the result of programming intended to create systems of circulating texts. Think of The Wayward as a poetics of the imaginary, stumbling over the grounds of the real – constantly questioning linguistic referents and ‘meaning in general.’ The work is a ground-breaking exploration of the roots and structures of online and offline life, in which language simultaneously explodes and implodes. Conversations among ‘emanents’ dominate inconceivable landscapes; sexualities are constructed and deconstructed. There’s not another work like it.

Poetry. Izanami and Izanagi stroll through Oriental landscapes and narrate parables in the mode of Zen-master stories. Nikuko, one of Sondheim's avatars, plays a role here too. Sondheim is well known as the comoderator of Wryting, once the Fiction-of-philosophy, and of the Cybermind mailing lists. He is responsible for the Trace Writing Project, an Internet community. He lives in Brooklyn.