Ania Szremski* wrote about my 18 year old interactive poem for the New York based 4Columns website. During the spread of corona 4Columns continued to write on art and commissioned writing that addresses specifically works of culture that are still available in the public sphere, in one guise or another.
Revisiting the net artist’s Flash poem Separation / Séparation:
You must click repeatedly on the pale-yellow field of a pop-up window to get the narrative to unspool, word by word, its story of pain, the lament of one suffering body being taken over by another, demanding, unfeeling one. The suffering seems to be caused by the melding of human and computer, but it’s not totally clear who is suffering.
in Separation / Séparation, Abrahams anticipates our impatient behaviors and both goads us into them, so we become conscious of these automatic operations, and induces us to comport ourselves differently, to adopt a gentler attitude in front of the poor pounded-on computer.
That escape comes easiest through technology, but not here: Abrahams bars the door to fugitive, algorithmic reprieve.
Ania Szremski is the managing editor of 4Columns. From 2011–15, she was the chief curator of Townhouse, a nonprofit contemporary art space in Cairo, Egypt; she was also a founding editor of Mada Masr, Egypt’s premiere platform for independent, progressive journalism. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
Filed under: Articles / Texts, Net art, 4Columns, Ania Szremski, Séparation, separation
