Distant Movement(s) #1

June 30th 19:10 Distant Movement(s) #1 (30′)
Distributed performance with audience participation.
On online togetherness and movement without movement.

In the frame of /Prolegòmeni e Gómene/ *
Performing Art 3Days, Teatro Rossi Aperto, Pisa (It).

by
Ad Hoc Group: Annie Abrahams, Daniel Pinheiro and Muriel Piqué.
With Ivana Gherbaz for the French-Italian translation.

Muriel, a choreographer from Montpellier, will guide a 12 minutes long choreographic gesture only using her voice in front of her webcam. She will describe, eyes closed, the bodily sensations she experienced during a choreographic sequence she developed based on simple daily activities in her private environment. Annie in Montpellier and Daniel in Lisbon will listen with their eyes closed in front of their webcams. All three will be united in one interface, that will be projected in Pisa in front of an audience. People in Pisa can watch the projection but also join the experience on the spot.
There will be no online audience.

Can we read this imaginary movement in people far away on the surface of a screen?
Can we share something as intimate as feeling a dance?
And does this sharing over time via machines connect us?

When we look at a projection of a face in close-up we enter an intimate space, an intimate space of looking closely into the subtle changes that occur. When we listen to someone sharing the feelings provoked by a dance, we sort of dream this dance, we think and feel it and this will open up to an interior of hitherto unexplored paths, the body shifting through careful guidance.

screencapture during the performance – more information soon.

*Prolegòmeni – explanatory dissertations introducing a theory, the subject of a study, a doctrine. Gómene – twisted hemp hawsers, mooring ropes for boats.
Hence: a line of words meant to validate other words, to unite or divide; a material line supported by gestures, to leave or land.

Advertisements

Filed under: networked performance, Performance, dance, Daniel Pinheiro, movement, Muriel Piqué, public participation

Esa – workshop plurimedia. OSP.

5/3 – 16/3 2018 Workshop plurimedia
La performance en ligne comme outil de dévoilement ? ESA La Réunion.
Aujourd’hui le corps humain est pénétré par les nouvelles technologies ; il est augmenté, prolongé, amélioré et surveillé par des applications. Le corps est contraint, maltraité, contrôlé et souvent oublié. Le corps qui libère, qui rattache le virtuel au réel et en sens inverse, qui fait médiation, qui est entre. Le corps qui n’est plus jamais seul, mais n’a pas appris à être avec, ce corps lié est le champ de nos recherches.

Plus de photos sur flickr – Merci aux étudiants, vous avez étés superbes.

Résultat d’une exercice d’écriture partagée : Textdynamics : Le corps humain est la surface par laquelle la machine a accès au réel ?

Open Source OSPedagogy Préparation Workshop ESA 9 pages .pdf Annie Abrahams.
Et voici quelques lien vers les carnets de travail assez différent d’approche de quelques étudiants:
https://meredithhoareaublog.tumblr.com
https://kmimai.tumblr.com
https://georgie-ganne.tumblr.com
https://villageniihl.tumblr.com
https://french-woman.tumblr.com

14/03 16h30 Rencontre avec Annie Abrahams Corps et nouvelles technologies.
École supérieure d’art de La Réunion, 102 Avenue du 20 Décembre 1848, Le Port, 97826.

Filed under: Conference / lecture, networked performance, Workshop, corps, dévoilement, ESA, La Réunion, OSP, OSPPP, plurimédia, webcam

distributed intelligence on the fly?

It felt as closely observing a test tube in an internet ecology experiment.

I finally watched the video of our performance Online En-semble – Entanglement Training. It was so nice and touching to hear the voices, to listen to the the different soundqualities and latencies, to see the changing pixelations and environments. It was interesting to observe how the performers act, react, respond, with objects, sounds and words and find ways to co-create with each other and the machines.

Near the end we had 5 minutes of silently being together online. Helen didn’t get the sign for the end and continued alone.

It was also very engaging to see the audience chatting life during the performance. Randal Packer called this a non-stop flow of online viewer commentary: a simultaneous litany of questions, responses, digressions, and interjections in Power to the Viewer, the article he wrote after his Art of the Networked Practice symposium, where this performance was a part of.

Here are some citations of the chat log that particularly stroke me today:

Alan Sondheim: There’s an odd calmness here, as if they’re dream images or freud’s magic slate at work

Jessica Laraine Williams: I almost feel as if we are neural nets being trained with various iterants of standard objects, as a reference library. The repetitive verbal cues sound like training signals

Martina Ruhsam: as if they would imagine this performance that just happened in their mind

ximena: what are they listening to?
Maria Chatzichristodoulou: silence?
Jessica Laraine Williams: the space in between
Jessica Laraine Williams: white noise
Randall Packer: silence
Jan R 2: they are listening to us
…..
Ng Wen Lei: 4’33
Johannes Birringer: lovely, a telematic re-performance

Maria Chatzichristodoulou: it is interesting that Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz were also talking about experiments rather than performances as such, and considered training, rehearsal and performance to be the same

I would love to do a follow-up, to continue this entanglement training. I propose to keep this messy never ending unperfect strange conversation going …. it would be an example, a test tube for developping our empathy muscles over distance, to exercice in distributed intelligence.

Entanglement Training Online performance by Annie Abrahams with Antye Greie, Helen Varley Jamieson, Soyung Lee, Huong Ngô, Daniel Pinheiro, Igor Stromajer. Thursday 29 of March 2018 in the frame of Art of the Networked Practice symposium.
All project info (photos, protocol, collected phrases, reactions etc.)  bram.org/en-semble/

Filed under: networked performance, Performance, Alan Sondheim, Antye Greie, Art of the Networked Practice, Daniel Pinheiro, entanglement, Helen Varley Jamieson, Huong Ngo, Igor Stromajer, Jessica Laraine Williams, Johannes Birringer, Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Martina Ruhsam, Ng Wen Lei, Randall Packer, Soyung Lee, training

media arts culture / traditional art systems

Marc Garrett interviewed artists Gretta Louw, Antonio Roberts & Annie Abrahams for the last chapter of his PHD Imaginative Dissent: Art, Technology and Social Change.

Unlocking Proprietorial Art Systems interview: with Artists, Gretta Louw, Antonio Roberts & Annie Abrahams.

Three different points of view on the relation between media arts culture and the already established, traditional art systems & if and how this relation changed over time.

– lack of viable commercial options – Freemium system – scary shared ownership – not grounded aesthetics – mimicking traditional systems – artists facilitate the introduction of technology to the layman and start to be used for that –

Filed under: Articles / Texts, Antonio Roberts, art, Gretta Louw, Marc Garrett, technology

LIF3STR3/\M – do you feel watched?

On March 4, 2018, while being in La Réunion FR (Indian Ocean), Daniel Pinheiro asked me to meet him on a surveillance webcam in Rue de Bleury, Montreal, CA.

He could not see me, but I could watch him online. We exchanged text messages, trying to discuss the possibilities of an architecture of surveillance as a form of agency between individuals.
Daniel edited the recorded surveillance webcam with the text we wrote :

Watching him on the surveillance cam during the exchange made me think of films made by Godard and Chantal Akerman.
Now I look at this video as showing a way to escape the standardized communication of the social media by using the spare time of a surveillance devise, showing a way to reinvent communication on our own terms. And maybe it’s also a piece on our relation – distant, by times “lonely”, but strongly connected.

This experiment was part of Daniel’s research LIF3STR3/\M.

Filed under: Of interest, Daniel Pinheiro, relation, surveillance

… building an empathy muscle …

Online-en-semble – Entanglement Training.

Huong Ngô: I really liked how the score was based on everyday movements, so close to those incidental images we make everyday when we are on Skype etc, but having us do it together really made it into something poetic and more like dance. I thought of Yvonne Rainer’s work. Also, I was thinking a lot about this promise of internationalist utopia that Maria talked about, and where we are in the world today – people becoming more extreme despite or because of technology. The distance that technology affords is something that we now must train our bodies against. I felt like the act of listening, patience, and trying to be present was a way to build that empathy muscle.

Rob Wittig : a wonderful performance today — tactile and musical and spooky and friendly and distant and close!

Images and photos on flickr
Performance protocol.pdf
Video :

From the chatlog (Complete Chat log 64 pages):
-Johannes Birringer: Karina, i learnt much from Corpos Informaticos, they used a whole different set of simple tools that i began to appreciate in many ways
-Daniel Perseguim: yes, Beatriz Medeiros from corpos informáticos are changing the ways of performing, learning expressing… the tools are the simple language, the failures, the “gambiarras”
-Alan Sondheim: there’s an odd calmness here, as if they’re dream images or freud’s magic slate at work
-Maria Chatzichristodoulou: yes Alan, i was thinking it’s a calming experience watching this
-Alan Sondheim: Calming in the midst of potential revolution, disturbance –
-Jessica Laraine Williams: I almost feel as if we are neural nets being trained with various iterants of standard objects, as a reference library. The repetitive verbal cues sound like training signals
-Alan Sondheim: there’s an economics at work
-Marc Garrett: It’s DIWO in realtime!
-Maria Chatzichristodoulou: it is interesting that Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz were also talking about experiments rather than performances as such, and considered training, rehearsal and performance to be the same

Filed under: networked performance, Performance, Antye Greie, Daniel Pinheiro, entanglement, Helen Varley Jamieson, Huong Ngo, Igor Stromajer, networked performance, protocol, Randall Packer, Soyung Lee, symposium

Training Entanglement with whom?

With amazing artists and machines, cables and you.

With Igor Stromajer, the pseudo-artist, who inspired me when in 2001 he started his famous Ballettikka Internettikka online performance series. We met in 2006, when he came to Montpellier to perform an Oppera Internettikka with me and a mezzo-soprano in the Opéra National de Montpellier Languedoc Roussillon. Over time we continued to collaborate actively in projects as The Big Kiss, Angry Women, HuisClos/No Exit and Beyond (spectacle) among others.

With Antye Greie (also known as AGF), a renowned composer, music producer, sound artist & curator, poet, feminist and activist, that I respect deeply. I performed 13 short performative conversational meetings online with her. We talked about html, wind, pixels, law, mothers, key frame, snow, philosophies, fruits, thinking and islands, humans and words, nuts, recording quality, law, shopping, wind, patriotism, love, ocean space, sound rate, communism, dancing, languages and salad, family and future. She also was a very active participant in the Angry Women project. We never met for real.

With Soyung Lee from South Korea who I never met for real neither, and with whom I never performed before. In 2016 I discovered her enchanting work Displaced when researching language practices and art. I tried to write about this hybrid performance and asked her some questions that are published here. Now she participates. Yes!

With Huong Ngô, an American artist, who I first met when I was in New York in 2010 for a Rhizome event and The Big Kiss performance with Mark River in OTO. Accidentally we met again some years later in Paris at an opening. We share an interest in the entanglement of language, identity and power relations and I admire the way she connects personal and political histories using a conceptual, interdisciplinary, and often collaborative approach. See for instance The Voice is an Archive or The Silent Period. Now we collaborate for the first time. Yes!

With Daniel Pinheiro, a Portugese video artist interested in telematics performance, who I met last summer in Porto where he participated in my ELO keynote performance Ours Lingages as singer, dancer and computer operator.  We had been collaborating before in the Distant Feeling(s), a tele-shared experience project (with also Lisa Parra), after I once participated in their LAND project. I especially appreciate the always very interesting observations and analyses he writes down. We will continue collaborating for sure.

With Helen Varley Jamieson, who coined the word cyberformance. I share a project called unaussprechbarlich and a book called Cyposium – the book with her. We had numerous online encounters in different online venues as for instance the Upstage platform, that she co-initiated. Helen is a feminist and a very fierce defender of the use of open-source software.

Many thanks to Randall Packer the symposium chair who made this possible!

Online En-semble – Entanglement Training
Live Online Performance Thursday, 29 March 2018, 7am-10am CDT / 8am-11am EDT / 2pm-5pm CEDT / 8pm-11pm SGT
In the frame of Art of the Networked Practice | Online Symposium – Social Broadcasting: an Unfinished Communications Revolution, School of Art, Design & Media, Nanyang University, Singapore (29 – 31 March 2018, a collaboration between the School of Art, Design & Media, Singapore; LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore; and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Performance, USA).

Filed under: Conference / lecture, Event, Performance, Antye Greie, Daniel Pinheiro, Helen Varley Jamieson, Huong Ngo, Igor Stromajer, Randall Packer, Soyung Lee

Online En-semble – Entanglement Training

Online En-semble – Entanglement Training.
Online performance with Annie Abrahams (NL/FR), Antye Greie (DE/FI), Helen Varley Jamieson (NZ/DE), Soyung Lee (KR), Huong Ngô (HK/USA), Daniel Pinheiro (VE/PT) and Igor Stromajer (SLO/DE)
In the frame of Art of the Networked Practice symposium, School of Art, Design & Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Chair by Randall Packer.

In this new work we investigate how to be together in a connected world, where machines and humans have to communicate accepting partial overviews, glitches, time-lags, disrupting audience participation and ensuing disorientations. Abrahams considers the intra-active webcam performance situation a good apparatus to train and demonstrate entanglement. She wrote a script for seven performers with different cultural backgrounds. They will defy their own and the others’ ideas on performance and online politics in a conversational performance. In order to avoid chit-chat and to get rid of the distracting images of the faces she proposes to converse using objects, prepared phrases and voices. During the performance they create together a changing composition with the objects and improvise a sound environment with their voices and phrases. Because they share the responsibility for the performances’ acoustic and visual appearance it will be interesting to see how they negotiate their individuality and personal thoughts in this environment where they all have equal power. Contradictions, maybe even oppositions, as well as poetry can emerge in this collectively created complexity, where machines facilitate but also prevent. The performers research the limits and possibilities of their own agency in an attempt to be “with” while being separated.

Program of the day:
8 pm SGT Introduction by Randall Packer.
8.15 pm SGT Maria Chatzichristodoulou keynote Live Art and Telematics: The Promise of Internationalism
9.30 pm SGT Online En-semble – Entanglement Training Live networked performance
10 pm SGT Post performance roundtable
This is Singapore time. Find your own time here.

How to connect for the performance (you will need 5 min to prepare).

Disentangling the Entanglements article on our preparations by Randall Packer

Web page with information about preparations, protocols, text, video, images and later the archives.

Latency Training.

Filed under: Performance, Antye Greie, Daniel Pinheiro, entanglement, Helen Varley Jamieson, Huong Ngo, Igor Stromajer, networked performance, Randall Packer, Soyung Lee, symposium

Open Source OSPPP (pedagogy, protocol, performance script)

22/03/2018. Today I was with 17 students ( Experimental Interaction) from the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. I had been invited by Randall Packer to prepare them for the upcoming Art of the Networked Practice online symposium.

.pdf protocol for my meeting with the students (online) – 4 online performance experimentations Fear – Love – Anger and Hope with an introduction.

Open Source  OSPPP (pedagogy, protocol, performance script), OSC (course)

More info : https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/17s2-dn1010-tut-g05/syllabus/social-broadcasting

Filed under: Conference / lecture, networked performance, open source, OSC, OSP, OSPPP

A promise of Internationalism?

Randall Packer invited Maria Chatzichristodoulou (AKA Maria X) to be the opening keynote speaker for the Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium because as a performance scholar she is uniquely committed to chronicling, critiquing and contextualizing live Internet art.

In an article called Live Art and Telematics: The Promise of Internationalism Randall writes that Chatzichristodoulou is bringing to our attention the “challenging restrictions placed upon the free circulation of people and ideas” that questions the utopic prediction of the “global village” more than fifty years ago by Marshall McLuhan.

He expects Maria’s probing analysis will stir up an interesting debate during the international symposium. ( March 29  – 31. Free to attend online or in Singapore. )

A promise of Internationalism? I don’t remember – Very curious to hear, and discuss with, Maria on the 29th, when we ( me and  Antye Greie, Helen Varley Jamieson, Soyung Lee, Hương Ngô, Daniel Pinheiro, and Igor Stromajer) will also do a performance called Online En-semble – Entanglement Training.

Filed under: Articles / Texts, Blast Theory, Maria Chatzichristodoulou, networked performance, Randall Packer