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

… 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

On Love

11 04 2013 8.00 pm
CB4 (the theatre), ATRiuM,
Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries,
University of Glamorgan,
Adam Street,
Cardiff, Wales, CF24 2FN.

On Love performance by Annie Abrahams FR, Denise Hardman UK, Ben Robinson UK, Tony Chapman UK, Derek Piotr USA, Hedva Eltanani UK, Martina Ruhsam SI, Antye Greie FI, Pascale Barret BE and Ienke Kastelein NL

Lead performance, invited by Garrett Lynch for the conference Remote Encounters  – Connecting bodies, collapsing spaces and temporal ubiquity in networked performance.

Remote Encounters, a two-day international conference with performance evening, aims to explore the use of networks as a means to enhance or create a wide variety of performance arts. How do networks as a site for performance provide opportunities for us as artists and performers? In particular how can we remotely collaborate, merge geographically separate places and times, reconfigure the space of performance and the relationship between artist and audience?

More information from bram.org/onLove

On Love: nothing can go wrong, all is part of the game, but you should never abandon.

Screencapture near the end of the performance

21 more screencaptures by Ienke Kastelein : Slideshow on flickr

This video shows some of the dynamics and a part of the Question and Answers we had afterwards live with the public. Are you all alone in front of your computer? Do you miss the public? Are you not also your own audience? Is this the first time you talk about love together? …

More information on bram.org/onLove

Article Meaningful connections: exploring the uses of telematic technology in performance by Elena Perez in Liminalities issue 10.1 Special issue of the journal of performance studies, Liminalities, based on the outcomes of the Remote Encounters: Connecting Bodies, Collapsing Spaces and Temporal Ubiquity in Networked Performance conference in 2013.  Edited by Garrett Lynch (University of South Wales) and Rea Dennis (Deakin University).

Filed under: Performance, Antye Greie, Ben Robinson, Denise Hardman, Derek Piotr, Garrett Lynch, Hedva Eltanani, Martina Ruhsam, on love, Pascale Barret, Remote Encounters, Tony Chapman, webperformance

Duet – Satz 1, 2, 3 et 4

Conversations between Antye Greie (aka AGF) et Annie Abrahams II – une série de Domestic Streaming Performances.

Respiration / Breathing, Le Quotidien / Daily life, La Famille / Der Familie, Les Rêves / L’Utopie / Dreams
13, 14, 15 et 16 décembre 2011 de 19h00 à 19h30
Ici, here et en direct sur le site de L’espace Multimédia Gantner

Performances de 5 à 30 minutes – possibilité de échange tchat pendant et après.
Performances between 5 and 30 minutes long – possibility to chat during and after.

It would be perfect if we hadn’t technical problems.
Remember forever more
It will last untill we will meet in real life.
You’re still the one I kiss good night
Verse 2 of a song by Annie and songlyricsgenerator  for Antye – August 2010.

In August 2010 Annie and Antye did  A Meeting is a Meeting is a Meeting – a first series of 9 Domestic Streaming Performances.

“… we explicitly challenge one another. We push each other towards new terrains, and into unknown, unrehearsed actions. We did not aim to produce an intimate encounter for this work, but the fact that we enter unknown realms makes it intimate because we cannot control the image of ourselves that we broadcast to the public. For this performance we both accept a discomforting prerequisite: something that we don’t want others to know about us, something secret, will, no doubt, escape. The moment this condition of discomfort suddenly and unexpectedly occurs is maybe one of the most intimate moments one can share: when a secret escapes during a performance, the minute it reveals itself to us and to our observers, this secret cannot but be unstaged. It is a moment of nakedness within the performance.”
Annie Abrahams on “A Meeting is a Meeting is a Meeting” in “Allergic to Utopias“,
interview for Digimag 58, October 2010 by Maria Chatzichristodoulou.

Antye Greie
Digital songwriter, sound composer and poet – Born 1969 in East Germany lives and works in Hailuoto, Finland. Known also as AGF. Focus of work includes the relationship between language and sound, audiovisual live performance, digital communication, sound installations and commissions for movies and theater. Throughout her career, Greie has released 20 long player records and numerous collaborations under such aliases as AGF/Delay (with Vladislav Delay), Greie Gut Fraktion (with Gudrun Gut), and The Lappetites (with Kaffe Matthews and Eliane Radigue), many collaborations with the award-winning classical composer Craig Armstrong. Greie also runs her own production company, AGF Producktion, and has produced records for other artists, including Ellen Allien (SOOL, 2009, BPitch).

Compositeur Digital et poète – Né en 1969 en Allemagne de l’Est vit et travaille à Hailuoto, en Finlande. Connu aussi comme AGF. L’objet de son travail comprend la relation entre le langage et le son, audiovisuel live performance, la communication numérique, des installations sonores et des commissions pour les films et le théâtre. Tout au long de sa carrière, Greie a publié 20 disques et a participé à de nombreuses collaborations sous des pseudonymes tels que AGF / Delay (avec Vladislav Delay), Fraktion Gut Greie (avec Gudrun Gut), et The Lappetites (avec Kaffe Matthews et Eliane Radigue), et avec le compositeur classique Craig Armstrong. Greie dirige également sa propre société de production, AGF Producktion, et a produit des enregistrements pour d’autres artistes, notamment Ellen Allien (Sool, 2009, BPitch).

Annie Abrahams
Docteur en biologie (Université d’Utrecht 1978) et diplômée de l’école des Beaux-Arts d’Arnhem (1986). Son travail, qui utilise aussi bien la vidéo, la performance que l’Internet, questionne les possibilités et les limites de la communication, dont elle explore plus spécifiquement les modalités propres au réseau. Elle est internationalement reconnue en tant que pionnière de la performance en réseau.
Elle a fait beaucoup de performances et a largement exposé son travail en France, y compris au Centre Pompidou, à Paris et dans de nombreuses galeries internationales, dont le Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center à Asheville, North Carolina, US ; Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Espagne; le New Musem à New York; Furtherfield gallery (formerly HTTP), Londres; le NIMk à Amsterdam et dans des festivals internationaux comme le Moscow Film Festival, le Festival international du film de Rotterdam et Stuttgarter Filmwinter, et sur des plateformes en ligne comme Rhizome.org et Turbulence. Du 28 octobre 2011 au 1 janvier 2012 le Crac de Sète lui consacrera une exposition personnelle sous le titre Training for A Better World.

Vidéo archive of Satz 1 Respiration / Breathing  http://vimeo.com/33682705
Screengrabset of Satz 1 http://www.flickr.com/photos/bramorg/sets/72157628413956717/
Video archive of Satz 2 Le Quotidien / Daily life http://vimeo.com/33748106
Video archive of Satz 3 La Famille / Der Familie http://vimeo.com/33773503
Video archive of Satz 4 Les Rêves / L’Utopie / Dreams  http://vimeo.com/33907750

Reaction On Duet – Satz, A letter to Annie by Margarida Carvalho

Filed under: Performance, AGF, Antye Greie, conversations, domestic streaming, Duet - Satz, Gantner, Poemproducer

Angry Women take 3 & 4

04 12 2011 18:30 Brussels  and online

Capture d’écran de Take 3 en français. vimeo.com/33492100

Screencapture of Take 4 in English. vimeo.com/33498082

Performance: Angry Women take 3 & 4  with Anne Laforet, Annie Abrahams, Antye Greie, Bérénice Belpaire, Hedva Eltanani, Hortense Gauthier, Ienke Kastelein, Jule Chateauvert, Laurence Moletta, Laurie Bellanca, Lucille Calmel, Martina Ruhsam, Olga P Massanet, Pascale Barret and Simona Polvani

Prototypes for · pour · voor transmission

Verbindingen/Jonctions 13
30 November → 4 December 2011

Filed under: Performance, angry women, Anne Laforet, Antye Greie, Bérénice Belpaire, Hedva Eltanani, Hortense Gauthier, Ienke Kastelein, Jule Chateauvert, Laurence Moletta, Laurie Bellanca, Lucille Calmel, Martina Ruhsam, Olga P Massanet, Pascale Barret, Simona Polvani, VJ13

Documentation 9 Meetings

A Meeting is a Meeting is a Meeting
5-14 08 2010 – 8 short Domestic Streaming performances
by Annie Abrahams and Antye Greie
for You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato
a show curated by Anna Smith and Nathalie Boobis, Wigan UK.

Where to find wilderness when you are at home? Sound : Antye Greie.

Reading a text on collaboration together.

What do you like?

Talking about Communism.

Talking about Love. “It would be perfect if we hadn’t technical problems”

Playing a ping pong game.

Surfing for News.

Turning around…  Sound Antye Greie.

More images http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=189754&id=620111023&l=0eeac88f83

The relation didn’t exist, it came into being.

Possible future subjects : Surveillance, Space, Intimacy, Our machines and Communism again.#

I love your music, your coolness, your sereness.

Filed under: Performance, Annie Abrahams, Antye Greie, conversations, domestic streaming, You Say Tomato

A Meeting is a Meeting is a Meeting

The relation doesn’t exist, it comes into being

During their holidays, every day from the 5th till the 14th of August, Annie Abrahams in Montpellier, France and Antye Greie in Hailuoto Finland, will meet for 5 minutes.
With text, sound and images they will explore, using a special webcam interface developped by Estelle Senay  Théâtre Paris-Villette / x-réseau, a different theme in each session.
Love, communism, wilderness, news, collaboration, space, patriotism are among them.

More information and online access http://www.bram.org/9meetings
A Meeting is a Meeting is a Meeting is included in You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato, show co-curated by Anna FC Smith and Nathalie Boobis, Wigan, UK.
This exhibition brings together a collection of 21 local and international artists and poets investigating the nature of linguistic disagreements. The concept of the show is inspired by Wittgenstein’s notion that every conversation is a game in which each player inevitably has their own rules.

#

Filed under: Performance, Anna Smith, Antye Greie, I Say Tomato, Nathalie Boobis, North by North Western Arts Festival, You Say Tomato

Huis Clos / No Exit – Jam

screen grabs collage from a test on the 7th of February

Telematic performance with AGF, Antye Greie from Hailuoto Finland, Pascale Gustin from Paris France, Maja Kalogera from Madrid Spain and Helen Varley Jamieson from Wellington New Zealand.

February 12th 2010
Join us either in HTTP in London at 8.30 pm or at Kawenga in Montpellier à 21h30.

Information en français http://bram.org/huisclos/jam/indexfr.html
More English information http://bram.org/huisclos/jam/index.html

Filed under: Performance, Antye Greie, Helen Varley Jamieson, HTTP gallery, Kawenga, Maja Kalogera, Pascale Gustin