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.
Broken Theory