On Internet, Meeting of Minds Is Just a Beginning : Technology: In ‘Love, Sex, Death,’ artist Alan Sondheim discusses relationships in cyberspace.

Guiding his listeners at the Huntington Beach Art Center through highlights of life on the Internet, New York writer and artist Alan Sondheim made good on his promise to discuss “Love, Sex, Death and Cyberspace.”

Sondheim, whose films and videos explore the relationship between technology and the body, is the creator of an Internet electronic-mailing list known as Cybermind. (Unlike news groups and bulletin boards, which are public forums open to anyone, e-mail lists require users to subscribe, are controlled by a moderator or list owner--and, says Sondheim, “tend to be more serious and form deeper communities” among users.)

Cybermind, which has a fluctuating membership of between 200 and 300, was formed to discuss philosophical issues. Yet every now and then, Sondheim says, someone will throw out a question such as, What did you guys eat for breakfast?, and “for the next 10 days there’ll be descriptions of breakfasts. It’s driving me crazy, this sort of trivia.”

But somewhere between trivia and high-minded discussion lies an intriguing by-product of the list: its ability to help people living far from one another to become acquainted both intellectually and physically, to fall in love, to monitor the last days of the dying or to grieve for mutual on-line friends.

“When you’re silent [on the Net], you are not there,” Sondheim said to his audience Thursday. “You are there only insofar as you are speaking [via a typed posting ]. In cyberspace, everything gets displaced onto the written text. “

Invoking Freud’s theory of hysteria as a deflection of mental symptoms onto parts of the body, Sondheim said that cyberspace “leads to exaggerated motions” on the part of users.

For example, someone who becomes physically aroused by a message may accidentally hit the wrong keys, filling the screen with nonsense symbols. Someone in love will often write about wanting to burst through the screen to embrace the loved one. Displacement also accounts for the surprising viciousness of “flame wars” (exchanges of angry messages), Sondheim said, because the combatants can express themselves only through writing.

When two people communicating through an e-mail list feel they have something in common, “a whole series of steps” ensue, Sondheim said, “each one increasingly an example of embodiment.” The couple will switch to private e-mail, then to phone calls, exchanges of photographs, videos, books and flowers--culminating, perhaps, in a face-to-face meeting.

“So much erotic tension builds up,” Sondheim said, recounting his own intensely passionate meeting with a rather strait-laced female e-mail correspondent in another state.

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He proposed that e-mail actually harks back to 18th-Century epistolary novels, the most famous example being Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela.” Consisting of letters supposedly sent from one character to another, this form of fiction created close identification between the reader and the fictitious letter-writers.

Women were the prime audience for the early novel; while the typical Internet user is a young male, the percentages of women among e-mail subscribers is much higher, Sondheim said.

“A lot are from rural communities,” he said. “[Women] in bad relationships, [who sometimes are] getting beaten up, and are finding a compassionate community on the Net.”

Net users with mental or medical problems also find helping communities, Sondheim said. Michael Curran, a 31-year-old e-mail friend of his in Des Moines who suffered from severe depression as well as a severe form of diabetes, died of heart failure several hours after they had been on-line together.

“For me, it was an initiation into [the human side of] the Internet,” Sondheim said. “It brought home that there are people behind the posts. . . . I got about 300 e-mail condolences. I was sending out notices of his death. I wrote a eulogy and sent it on the Net. There were phone calls. . . . It was interesting to see how people came together on the Net.”

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Sondheim has never come across a pedophile. And, contrary to occasional, sensationalized reports, he said, he hasn’t found people trying to conceal their identities.

He cited one Cybermind discussion about fiction and philosophy that involved frank sexual terminology during which one contributor described herself as a 13-year-old who hoped to be a “philosopher-musician.” Sondheim removed her from the list and instructed her to get her parents’ permission.