I attended Alan's presentation at Furtherfield Commons yesterday
evening, and one of the pieces he showed was a Second Life-based piece
called 'suicide' (http://www.alansondheim.org/suicide.mp4) which I
hadn't seen before, and which made a strong impression on me. For those
who don't know it, it's a blurry grey-green maelstrom of shapes and
transitions - one of Alan's characteristic 'edgespace' experiments,
where he takes a virtual 3D environment and pushes it to the point where
the software can't handle what he's trying to make it do, and everything
starts going into meltdown. This one is a particularly extreme example,
and seems to have caught even Alan himself off-guard, as you can see
from a number of text-comments he posts on-screen as the piece unfolds -
'What the hell? Where did that come from?' etc. All of a sudden, in the
middle of this whirling chaos, a cube appears - Alan comments that he's
sure he didn't put that in there - followed by what looks startlingly
like a fertilized egg trying to achieve its first cell-division - 'Fuck
it's a cell of some kind... It's a ctenophore', says Alan. Then the
software crashes, or rather jams, and the message 'You have committed
suicide' appears onscreen.
It struck me on the way home that this piece ticks a lot of the boxes in
Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime, from the eighteenth century -
'Edmund Burke was not the first philosopher to be intrigued by the power
and complexity of the idea of the sublime but his account of it was
exceedingly influential. He broke the idea of the sublime down into
seven aspects, all of which he argued were discernible in the natural
world and in natural phenomena:
Darkness – which constrains the sense of sight (primary among the five
senses)
Obscurity – which confuses judgement
Privation (or deprivation) – since pain is more powerful than pleasure
Vastness – which is beyond comprehension
Magnificence – in the face of which we are in awe
Loudness – which overwhelms us
Suddenness – which shocks our sensibilities to the point of disablement'
(http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/christine-riding-and-nigel-llewellyn-british-art-and-the-sublime-r1109418)
In a nutshell Burke's theory was that things which overwhelm and
bewilder us, fill us with awe, carry us beyond the bounds of our own
power of comprehension and force us to confront the otherness of the
non-human world, have a more profound affect on us than things which are
orderly, harmonious, symmetrical, explicable and unsurprising. The
sublime was therefore more profoundly affecting than the beautiful and
the picturesque: mountains, cataracts, thunderstorms, ravines,
avalanches and so forth were more profoundly affecting than placid
rivers, lakes, sandy beaches, gardens and pastures.
Of course in Alan's piece we're getting the sense of obscurity,
confusion/privation of the senses, shock, bewilderment and otherness
described by Burke - but we're not getting them from nature. On the
contrary, we're getting them in just about the most unnatural way
possible. And for Burke, the fact that we were getting these experiences
from nature meant that we were getting them from God. A glimpse of the
sublime was a glimpse of the Almighty. Yet here we are, it seems, having
those same experiences in an environment which is entirely man-made,
albeit distorted and pushed beyond the limit of its own rules to the
point where those rules seem to disintegrate and something else seems to
emerge. I think Alan made the remark 'It felt as if some other
intelligence was in there' - because the cube and the cell-creature
seemed to pop up of their own accord, without any agency on his part. A
glitch of the software and a trick of the imagination no doubt, but a
bona fide experience of the sublime nevertheless, which is what's so
intriguing about it.
Just thought I'd mention it.
Edward
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