At some point in the distant future, I would venture to say that Alan Sondheim's name will be mentioned along with Whitman's and Dickinson's as being one of the American pioneers of a new aesthetic. Not only is Sondheim a prolific and thoughtful writer (he's written books--Being on Line: Net Subjectivity (Lusitania, 1996), Disorders of the Real (Station Hill, 1988)--as well as an exhaustive and fascinating Jabes-tinged phenomenology of net culture, the Internet Text (http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt)), but he's also composed some of the most sensual and startling digital paintings available on the net. In addition to all this (as if these shockwaves weren't enough!), Sondheim has made movies. A wonderful sampling of his work is now available at futherfield.org (http://www.furtherfield.org/asondheim/docs/index.htm), under the title Skein & Theory.
One of the unusual things about Skein & Theory is that there's very little text--quite strange, considering that Sondheim is a prolific writer. The exhibition consists mostly of his digital images (derived via various algorithmic manipulations using imaging software like Mathematica) and quick time movies. True to the furtherfield credo, many of the images are racy. While the first set (the skein series) starts off with some rather brilliant and colorful abstractions, they soon digress into images of Sondheim immersed in water. In one he lies face down in water manipulated red: quite haunting, especially as this is placed in the first set of images (it's as if the over-cited "death of the author" had become quite literal; or is it a reference to the "death" referenced in many accounts of tribal shamanism, wherein the corporeal existence of the shaman initiate is destroyed, often violently, to make way for the cosmic consciousness of the spirit realm?). In one, amid a blood-red plain of undulating water, Sondheim appears to be swimming toward a glowing ram (an astrological reference? Or another stain of shamanistic phenomenology?).
If these images form their own syntax (and furtherfield's presentation of them, in a JavaScript slideshow format, with the user clicking through them one-by-one, is clearly reminiscent of a syntactical structure), the abstractions leading to swimming images of the skein series is predicated by the theory images, which are where furtherfield's transgressive aesthetic comes at one full-swing. These are images of nudity mostly, body parts (presumably of Sondheim and his wife
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