Alan Sondheim

Alan Sondheim caught COVID-19 in late August 2023, and was violently ill for over a week; after that, his condition descended into long Covid. The result has seen an array of physical and mental problems, such as fatigue, visual disturbances, and, oddly, his nail growth slowing to almost nothing. Sondheim began writing a series of texts throughout this period, mostly typing with his eyes closed, and keeping the errors in; Sondheim intended to focus on content and ignore the 'burden' of sight, the physical part most affected by long Covid, which brings so much else into play. In other words, Haptic, Covid, Philosophy is a form of meditation.

HYPER-ANNOTATION contributors: wayne mason, alan sondheim, d.m. mitchell, ellie chou, made in dna, francisco borges, giselle bolotin, bec lambert, n.casio poe, sophia yung, tom bland, dan macneil, callum leckie, kirill azernny, david roden publisher: kenji siratori

Broken Theory is a jettisoned collection of fragmentary writing, collected and collaged by new media artist, writer, musician, and theorist Alan Sondheim. Folding theoretical musings, text experiments, and personal confessions into a single textual flow, it examines the somatic foundations of philosophical theory and theorizing, discussing their relationships to the writer and body, and to the phenomenology of failure and fragility of philosophy's production. Writing remains writing, undercuts and corrects itself, is always superseded, always produced within an untoward and bespoke silo - not as an inconceivable last word, but instead a broken contribution to philosophical thinking. The book is based on fragmentation and collapse, displacing annihilation and wandering towards a form of "roiling" within which the text teeters on the verge of disintegration. In other words, the writing develops momentary scaffoldings - writing shored up by the very mechanisms that threaten its disappearance.Broken Theory is prefaced by a text from Maria Damon and followed by an extensive interview with art historian Ryan Whyte. Alan Sondheim is a new media artist, theorist, and writer concerned with the phenomenology of the virtual. He has collaborated with motion capture and virtual environment labs. His work is concerned with the inhabitation of the body in the virtual; with the textuality of the body; with the problematic of mixed reality and codework. His writing is known for its "somatic grit" and skeletal codes that partially appear within and determine the surface. This style embeds interferences among syntax, semantics, and formal systems. The textual body, body of text and writer, are deeply entangled. His current work is based on the psychogeography of real and virtual worlds and their modeling. Most recently he has focused on "semantic ghosting" - the body behind the virtual/symbolic body - and modes of viral dispersion in a series of videos and texts. Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, attended Brown University, and has exhibited, taught, and lectured at a number of venues in the United States and abroad.

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, emails, 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.