Why is the use of videoconferencing so exhausting? An analysis on the demands. Video essay by ANNIE ABRAHAMS and DANIEL PINHEIRO.
Abrahams, A., Pinheiro, D., Carrasco, M., Zea, D., La Porta, T., de Manuel, A., … Varin, M. (2020). Embodiment and Social Distancing: Projects. Journal of Embodied Research, 3(2), 4 (27:52). DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/jer.67
Traduction en français : Pourquoi l’utilisation de la visioconférence est-elle si épuisante? Une analyse. l’intimité est gênante l’intimité est gênante AUCUN APERÇU AUCUN APERÇU AUCUN APERÇU AUCUN APERÇU AUCUN APERÇU AUCUN APERÇU AUCUN APERÇU PAS DE VUE D’ENSEMBLE vous devez scanner l’écran en continu interruption(s) impossible de détecter des détails subtils pas de détail l’imagination remplace les signes secondaires de la communication et ceux-ci doivent être traités sur leur utilité nous sommes enclins à vérifier notre propre image tout le temps comme si nous avions besoin d’une assurance continue que la connexion existe toujours tout le son est mélangé dans un environnement sonore mono, cela conduit à une compression de l’espace partagé, nous devons deviner d’où vient le son distraction(s) toi, je et moi une situation triangulaire dans laquelle nous nous sentons et nous regardons nous-mêmes et les autres … c’est psychologiquement exigeant: notre cerveau doit traiter le soi comme corps et comme image interruption(s) vous ne voyez les visages de près que lorsque vous êtes bébé dans un berceau ou avec un amoureux au lit vous ne voyez les visages de près que lorsque vous êtes bébé dans un berceau ou avec un amoureux au lit il y a du délai nous ne sommes jamais exactement dans le même temps / espace Tout cela contribue à un épuisement. Nous essayons de dépasser les limites des environnements artificiels sans prendre en compte ses spécificités. Que se passe-t-il si nous supprimons les sens que nous utilisons le plus pour communiquer? Et si nous fermons les yeux et ne parlons pas. Qu’est-ce qui reste?
Svp si vous utilisez ce texte citez l’original : Abrahams, A., Pinheiro, D., Carrasco, M., Zea, D., La Porta, T., de Manuel, A., … Varin, M. (2020). Embodiment and Social Distancing: Projects. Journal of Embodied Research, 3(2), 4 (27:52). DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/jer.67
Breathing by Utterings* Online Performance STWST48x6 MORE LESS Live-Stream + Screening in the Club Venue Fri, Sept 11, 19:00 – 19:30 Stadtwerkstatt, Linz, Au.
If you want to assist connect at 18h55 to https://zoom.us/j/93113189232 Pass: breath View recommandations : When you enter, your video and audio will be turned OFF, please leave it that way, if you click on the “up arrow” next to your camera icon ((lower left-hand toolbar) your VIDEO SETTINGS can be accessed, go to “video settings”, click the box “Hide non-video participants”. Then the performers only will be visible. Select “Gallery View” in upper right corner of the ZOOM window to see the group.
With the 6th edition of the 48-hour showcase extravaganza, Stadtwerkstatt asks questions about the more-or-less situations, the counter-validity zones and the non-zero-sum games of the future. It is all and nothing about rational and irrational approaches in larger contexts, driven by questions of MORE, LESS, and above all of the OTHER.
Contributors: Annie Abrahams, Ina Blom, Natalie Bookchin, Pablo deSoto, Ben Grosser, Adnan Hadzi, Judit Kis, Patricia G. Lange, Hang Li, Patrick Lichty, Geert Lovink, Gabriel Menotti, Sabine Niederer, Dan Oki, Aras Ozgun, Daniel Pinheiro, Rahee Punyashloka, Oliver Lenore Schultz, Peter Snowdon, Andreas Treske, Colette Tron, Jack Wilson, Dino Ge Zhang.
… A silent, yet sentient, relational encounter, materialized as a telematic embrace where nothing seems to happen and where the lack of apparent action has transformed into the transposition of the concept of agency and a potential way for fighting alienation. …
… Distant Feeling(s) highlights in its genesis and continuity the need to feel/sense presence and suggests a pragmatic approach for reshaping a consciousness on kinship resorting to available technological tools which have been transforming its meaning. …
Page 185-193. Distant Feeling(s)Annie Abrahams & Daniel Pinheiro. We describe the genesis and history of thisperformance series where in an online interface, that normally is used for videoconferencing we spend time together eyes closed and not talking.
* Founded in 2007, Video Vortex is a lively network of artists, activists, coders, curators, critics, and researchers linked by the exchange of ideas, materials, and discussions both online and offline. The first Video Vortex reader came out in 2008, followed by a second in 2011. This third anthology covers the turbulent period from Video Vortex #7 (2013) in Yogyakarta, across the meetings that followed in Zagreb, Lüneburg, Istanbul, Kochi, and finally Malta in 2019.
31/03 at 18h30 Paris time (CET, GMT+1) Find your time here. Online. Duration 40 min.
If you are interested in attending as a listener please send a private email to one of the members and you will be invited.
Utterings is a collaborative attempt to go beyond the borders and closures created by languages, opening up and transgressing these in a performance that probes meaning through pre-language communication and formerly un-inhabited expressions. In Utterings communication is not approached as a transmission of information, ruled by code or abstract conventions, but as connection through affection, attention, glitches and even voids.
Members of Utterings are Annie Abrahams (FR), Daniel Pinheiro (PT), Constança Carvalho Homem (PT), Curt Cloninger (US), Nerina Cocchi (BE) and Derek Piotr (US).
On the 22nd of February 16h30 Paris time during the festival Audioblast #8, Utterings sera diffusé en direct en ligne et sur un système de spatialisation radiophonique installé à la Plateforme Intermédia, 4 Boulevard Léon Bureau, 44200 Nantes. Organisation APO-33. Online listen here: Concerts en ligne. 22-23/02 2020.
Utterings is a project by Annie Abrahams (FR) and Daniel Pinheiro (PRT) with Constança Carvalho Homem (PRT), Curt Cloninger (US), Nerina Cocchi (BE) and Derek Piotr (US) as invited artists and collaborators. Technical assistance: Jan de Weille. Since this event Utterings is a band.
Utterings is a sound-only networked performance experiment where six artists commit to a 30 min long exchange across distance. The artists gather online and, while blindfolded, they engage in utterings as communication, building on solo’s, duo’s, chorals and silence, creating an on the fly “new” language, that forwards attention, trust and affects above rationality. Six sound streams (no instruments used) are interlaced and entangled in one single polyphonic composition shared live in the audioblast program. The protocol for this performance will be written collectively in the week before the performance.
As an individual it is very difficult to address the problems related to all kind of global emissions. Of course you can act privately, but we need more. Utterings is a collaborative attempt to go beyond the borders and closures created by languages, opening up and transgressing these in a performance that probes meaning through pre-language communication and formerly un-inhabited expressions. Communication not as transmission of information, ruled by a code or abstract conventions, but connected with affection and attention will counter data imperialism and rationalist exploitation.
how to go beyond glossolalie? what will be the intention? is attunement enough? if we manage to avoid meaning we may discover something Martine Neddam: Glossolalia is ‘dancing with words’. Dance first, before moving beyond dancing. Igor Stromajer: An extremely intriguing concept. Who knows, perhaps you don’t even have to go beyond glossolalia. If glossolalia is done “right”, it already goes beyond … itself.
Mikhail Bakhtin has a posse!
Audioblast is a festival de création sonore utilisant le réseau comme lieu de diffusion, il se compose de nombreuses pratiques audio en réseau, de musique expérimentale, drone, noise, field recordings, poésie sonore, électroniques et musiques contemporaines.
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville (US). His art has been featured in the New York Times and at museums, galleries, and festivals from Korea to Brazil. His fifth book, “Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art,” is forthcoming from Punctum Books as part of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s 3Ecologies Immediations series. His writing and art may be accessed at lab404.com, playdamage.org, and deepyoung.org.
Nerina Cocchi is an Italian theatre artist and translator based in Brussels, Belgium. A 2019 recipient of Bourse Claude Etienne, a fellowship for emerging Belgian playwrights, she took part in the Arctic Circle Residency and sailed in the Arctic region in 2019. Co-artistic director of inoutput, an international group of artistic creation, she also works as assistant producer for Belgian dance company Dame de Pic/Cie Karine Ponties and is the author of “THE WArDROBE”, an operatic film to be released in 2020-21.
Derek Piotr (b. 1991) is a Poland-born producer and composer based in New England, whose work focuses primarily on the human voice. His work covers genres as diverse as glitch, leftfield pop, chamber, dance, and drone; and is primarily concerned with tenderness, fragility, beauty and brutality. derekpiotr.com
Constança Carvalho Homem studied Modern Languages and Literatures at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto. She completed her Masters in Text and Performance Studies with Distinction at King’s College London and RADA. In recent years, she sought the offshoots of a Grotowski-inspired unified stage practice, having trained with Matej Matejka, Thomas Richards/Mario Biagini and Maud Robart. Porto-based, she works as translator, dramaturg, performer and director. Radio plays and improvised music are two major interests. Of her recent collaborations, she’d highlight 2019’s Hysteria
Annie Abrahams, artist and performer based in Montpellier France, investigates the possibilities and limits of communication under networked conditions. She is known worldwide for her netart and collective writing experiments and is an internationally regarded pioneer of networked performance art. bram.org
Daniel Pinheiro, performer and visual artist based in Porto, Portugal has been developing work in the field of Telematic Art mostly as a resource to discuss and reflect upon the impact of technology on everyday life. daniel-pinheiro.tumblr.com
Daniel and Annie work occasionnally together since 2014.
It is not a proposition for a revolution nor a resolution for an evident relational crisis, it is an experience on connectivity and its fundamentals.
Distant Feeling(s) #7: Our annual re-activation of Distant Feeling(s)*. Once again we shared time together, online, without speaking and with our eyes closed.
Distant Feeling(s) #7 happened through a video-conferencing session in zoom** on Saturday Dec. 7th 6:00 – 6:15 PM GMT+1 (Paris time).
Online. Open to all. Duration 15 min.
A silent, yet sentient, relational encounter. A telematic embrace where nothing seems to happen and where the lack of action is precisely its potential for fighting alienation. We are performing absentia within the network, while the network is functioning. We research togetherness through the Internet as a way to counter its fallacy which drives the (im)possibility of collective strength. Can we find novelty in an already established system, and act from within, towards (an)other purpose(s)?
** If you want to join you need to install the zoom application on your device. Free download from https://zoom.us/download#client_4meeting and connect to 5 min before the performance starts.
In Distant Movements we close our eyes. Thus we immerse ourselves in the imagination of our own space and we can not control how we appear on the screen. We are guided through this space, at the same time real, virtual and imaginary, by a voice. It is this voice that creates a shared mental space.
In this shared space our bodies dance and interpret, each in their own way, the words coming in two different languages.It is clear that in the immediacy of our interpretations, our smallest differences occur, revealing an unsuspected value.So many bodies, so many dances: in-reproducible, inimitable.And each one gets in tune with the other and dances with the other, imagining the dance of the other in his own inner space.
In July 2018 Daniel Pinheiro, a performer and visual artist based in Porto, Muriel Piqué, a choreographic artist, researcher and performer from Montpellier and I started working on a new project called Distant Movements. In this project the intense presence of and attention for the unseen other, experienced in another online networked project called Distant Feelings*, is extended with an exploration of our bodies in motion and the imagination of the other who also moves, who also dances.
Distant Movements wants – to give an intimate access to a danced, dancing body – to reveal the body to poetry / to acces a poetic body – to activate a body at a distance – to research – the relation body-machine, their interdependence, their entanglement, the connection, the constraints – meeting at a distance mediated by cables, the voice, our imagination, our sensations – the relation between the real space / virtual space / imagined space.
– to share the magic of dancing together over distance
Distant Movements uses performance as a tool.
Distant Movements manifests itself as – a research web site; an anarchive** : traces intended to be potential carriers, that can be reactivated. – a series of online experiments – online participatory performances accessible via zoom.us – performances / installations in situ – video traces some of which will have the status of a stand-alone art work.
Distant Movements can be followed here : distantmovements.tumblr.com
So far we had 7 sessions. In the future we will invite more people to assist in our experiments.
———-
* Distant Feelings is an ongoing project by Annie Abrahams and Daniel Pinheiro – an online ritual of contemplation on our situation of being together while being separated. Eyes closed, no talking.
** For a concise definition of the anarchive visit senselab.ca.
June 30th 19:10 Distant Movement(s) #1 test (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.
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 TrainingOnline 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/
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, showinga 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.
June 30th 19:10 Distant Movement(s) #1 test (30′)
net art, video, performance 
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