Online performance – three articles.

If you are interested in remote collaboration and art you may want to read these. Flaws and possibilities, conditions for participation and audience agency are treated.

Trapped to Reveal – On webcam mediated communication and collaboration. Annie Abrahams, Jar #2 ISSN 2235-0225, 2012.
It is about performance, it is about processes and human beings being transformed. Annie Abrahams formulated motives, described means and managed to give this research a succinct philosophical and political background.

Learn together what it means to be connected CyPosium – The Book, 2014, ISBN 9781291988925.
Annie Abrahams reflects, referring to Kit Galloway, Gregory Bateson and Susan Kozel on her participation in and the interest and importance of the Cyposium.
…we will have to become more radical in our experimentations and start to be more critical towards our own work. We shouldn’t be afraid to operate a ‘niche’, where we are ‘just’ our own audience. It might be a prerequisite for new discoveries, for the creation of a situation where we learn together what it means to be connected...

Preconditions for Online Participation PAIC, 2019.
Annie Abrahams finds that an awareness of hardware and software influences, clear and open protocols, familiarization with the technology, an active role and a hospitable environment for the participants are obligatory to allow them to enjoy an aesthetics of attention and trust, where their choices and behavior count.

Filed under: Articles / Texts, networked performance, Performance, collaboration, conditions, participation, webcam

Preconditions for Online Participation

Summary:
In this article Annie Abrahams gives a short personal, yet critical overview of her always collaborative and often participatory artistic practice. Based on her experiences she tries to formulate some general preconditions for it to be successful. She finds that an awareness of hardware and software influences, clear and open protocols, familiarisation with the technology, an active role and a hospitable environment for the participants are obligatory to allow them to enjoy an aesthetics of attention and trust, where their choices and behavior count.

Preconditions for Online Participation should have been part of the PAIC (Participatory Arts for Invisible Communities) e-book published in 2018. For internal communication issues too futile and irritating to remember it ended as a not-even-edited blogpost on their website. This was hard, because I had done what was needed, and on time – they had not.

After regurgitating my anger I decided to also publish the article, meant for lay-wo-men, but not only, on my own website and to upload it also to academie.edu. Here you can download a Preconditions of Online Participation.pdf of the article (with images :)).

…When participants connect, they have to find themselves in a hospitable environment. They need to feel welcome. In chatrooms during events for instance, I always ask someone familiar to the project to mediate, to answer questions, to animate, when I cannot do that myself.
Participation needs to be rewarding. When an interesting exchange is going on, this can be natural. Sometimes it is already enough to be seen present in a particular public event or to be part of a specific community. Concrete influence or agency by the members of the audience is also very motivating...

Filed under: Articles / Texts, anger, collaboration, conditions, enabled constraints, networked performance, participation

Networked Conversations

Image courtesy of the Third Space Network

After Videofreex and Kit Galloway and before Gene Youngblood I’ll be Randall Packer‘s third guest in the Networked Conversations series.

Saturday May 13th 6pm – 7pm Paris time. (Find your local time here.)

To participate you should go to the Third Space Network.
https://connect.ntu.edu.sg/thirdspacenetwork/
Select “Guest,” type your name, and “Enter Room.”

Networked Conversations is a series of live, online interviews and discussions hosted by Randall Packer. The series features media artists, curators, writers, and activists exploring a broad range of social, political and aesthetic topics at the intersection of net culture. Networked Conversations collapses geographical and cultural boundaries via participatory Internet chat: free & open & accessible from anywhere in the world.
For more information visit:
http://www.thirdspacenetwork.com/

Filed under: Interview, Of interest, collaboration, history, Intimacy, networked performance, Randall Packer, Third Space Network

Iterations

I don’t know where this is going
7/06-23/06
Résidence Itérations.
With
Miriam Raggam
Pascale Barret
Claire Williams
François Zajega
Julien Deswaef
Annie Abrahams

Iterations is a project investigating the future of collaborative artistic practices in a technologically networked context. More background aussi en FR en NL

Iterations is co-ordinated by Peter Westenberg (Constant) and Reni Hofmüller (esc).

Constant association for art and media, Bruxelles and ESC medien kunst labor, Graz.

Exposition Imal Bruxelles 23/06/ – 31/07/2016.

Next week we will start our two week residency in Iterations which will finish with an exhibition in Imal. We don’t or hardly know each other, we are very different – age, approach, skills. We talked remotely 4 times so far. We also used a pad to prepare. We don’t know where we are going. There will be maps, moving objects, rasppi’s and a lot of discussion. I feel unsure about my role. I am used to organise things, events, to script people (even myself). This time it feels as if I am in a turmoil, as if I am material, part of something else, I have to let go…

30/06 I couldn’t find my place, I left the project halfway through. Collaboration wasn’t a subject, but something you had to do. Without a structure and roles not clearly defined it became participation in something I hadn’t really chosen.

Filed under: Installation, collaboration, Constant, ESC, Peter Westenberg, reni hofmüller, residency

Désert Numérique #3

JE NE VEUX PAS ÊTRE SEULE
Tableaux plus ou moins vivants
Installation de Annie Abrahams
assistée par Lili Mamath et Alexandra Rio
Samedi, Dimanche
Installation et performance participative en réseau
Festival Désert Numérique #3

Deux personnes se rencontrent à distance à travers l’écran de leur ordinateur et une webcam. Deux lieux séparés sont filmés et composent chacun la moitié d’une image projetée dans l’espace public. Une série de « tableaux plus ou moins vivants », créés sur place avec les participants et le public du festival.

… / un temps d’explication – image fixe / un temps d’action – image en mouvement capturée en images fixes par quelqu’un du public / un temps de sélection des captures – une autre image fixe / …

42 Captures d’écran

Du pied à l’oeil – Tentative de communication avec les pieds  – Les nombrils qui respirent – Chanter la marseillaise ensemble – Combat – Dormir ensemble – Les mains – Un corps partagée – Se pencher à deux.

Filed under: Installation, Performance, coördination, collaboration, Désert Numérique, participative, tableaux plus ou moins vivants, webcam

On Collaboration – txt

Ecriture partagée / collecte  On co – laboration – operation – construction – creation and human constraints Collective writing / collection

(ENG) Collaboration on and via the Internet has been a hot topic for some time. Now everyone tends to see the Net more as a space for conservative individual self-representation and mediation. I wonder about this. What makes it so difficult? Why doesn’t, does it work? Why are people less interested?

(FR) La collaboration sur et via Internet a été un sujet important pour un certain temps. Aujourd’hui le Net est plus considéré comme un espace plutôt conservateur, individuel de représentation et médiation de soi. J’y songe.  Pourquoi est-ce si difficile? Pourquoi les gens s’y intéressent moins?

(NL) Er werd in het verleden veel gepraat over Samenwerken op en via het Internet. Tegenwoordig ziet eenieder het Net meer als een plek waar men zichzelf presenteert, promoot. Dat geeft te denken. Wat is er zo moeilijk aan?, Waarom werkt het wel, niet? Waarom interesseren mensen zich er minder voor?

On Collaboration is a part of the Huis Clos No Exit research project.

Filed under: Collective writing, collaboration