War, Electronic Literature, Testimony, Textamony

"War, Electronic Literature, Testimony, Textamony" is a video work by Alan Sondheim created for the 2023 New Media Writing Prize unconference.

"Created for the Unconference, this video considers the
relationship between what we do and what occurs in war, in
terror, in flight, in ordinary life. I made it on almost no
sleep, a poor excuse, but so it was. There are errors in it,
probably absurdities; even so, I'm attempting to think through
what for me has been a constant haunting. In a sense, it's not
personal; it's the same old story. I want to differentiate
between testimony - what one witnesses, what one has been told,
what one has lived through - and textamony - the recreation of
events in fiction, in poesis (including my own), in trying to
come to grips with what happened. All of this can be effaced
in false testimony or written as truth in textamony, where AI
(artificial intelligence) may play a part. How do we think, in
other words, the unthinkable? What if the unthinkable is
transformed into a fiction where the dead are held accountable
for their own demise?

I want to thank everyone at the Unconference for the opportunity
to think through this work, which will be presented in part at
the event."

-- Alan Sondheim