Maria Damon and Murat Nemet-Nejat Interview Alan Sondheim for Rain Taxi

At Rain Taxi, an interview with Alan Sondheim by Maria Damon and Murat Nemet-Nejat! "Since January of 1994, Sondheim has worked on the 'Internet Text,' a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body, and virtuality; the Internet Text is coordinated with multi-media work on various websites. A pioneer in the field of electronic literature, he coined the term 'codework' to signify the multiple ways in which computer coding language itself becomes part of the diegetics of the immanent text." An excerpt from this conversation:

[Maria Damon]: Being a polymath, do you ever experience conflict between your many modes of artistic practice—playing music, writing words, designing visual effects—or are they seamlessly integrated for you? How do you layer a piece?

[Alan Sondheim]: This is a really good question, going to the heart of things. For me, every piece, whether writing or mixed-mode or music, is an open world; even in the music, there are always serious philosophical concerns which can be expressed that way. For example, the guzheng pieces are played on both sides of the bridges; one side is in-tune, and the other side supports the in-tune side. But that support also represents (as I wrote) a kind of abject musical field, which can undercut or form part of a “tonal sea” with the other; they're in dialogue, if not dialectic. That fascinates me, as to those precursor moments in dance or music when performers are “getting ready” to perform, and I've made films of them—they're not liminal, in-between, moments, but moments beforehand where the breath is held.

The same is true in my writing, whether I'm using computer programming or not—there's always a moment of entering the literary-philosophical thicket.

For me, then, these aren't separate modes, but moments that wash over one another, create skeins of associations. The images work the same for me—for example, with the guzheng, I had, at least in one piece, put up images of blood-red shelf mushrooms that were decaying, intensely; they'll survive that way through the winter! So there is form and abject exhaustion in their raggedness, but also hope!

Read it all at Rain Taxi.