Before The First online performance

In 2020, many people encountered online performance for the first time.
We asked some of our peers “When was your first online performance?”
BEFORE THE FIRST is a brief glimpse of the diversity of online performance created before 2020.
Compiled by Annie Abrahams, Helen Varley Jamieson and Suzon Fuks. Edited by Suzon Fuks.

With thanks to:
Gwendoline Samidoust, Lucie Desaubliaux, Muriel Piqué, Soyung Lee, Lily Robert-Foley, Gilson Moraes Motta, Atefeh Khas, Elaine Vaan Hogue, Alejandra Ceriani, Ximena Alarcon, Daniel Pinheiro, Emma Che Raethke-Martin, Christina Papagiannouli, Martina Ruhsam, Rosa Sanchez, Caroline Delieutraz, Jorge Rojas, Rebekah Wild, Miljana Perić, Alan Sondheim, Patrick Lichty, Roger Mills, James Cunningham, Johannes Birringer, Joseph DeLappe, Keith Armstrong, Karla Ptáček, Auriea Harvey, Jean-Marc Matos, John Hopkins, Nina Sobell, Antoinette LaFarge, Adriene Jenik and Paul Sermon.

We also made a pdf with more info on the works in the video

Download

DISCLAIMER

Filed under: networked performance, Performance, Video, Beforethefirst, Helen Varley Jamieson, Suzon Fuks

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

Ours Lingages – Documentation

Ours Lingages
Performance by
Annie Abrahams concept, script, reading, singing

with
Daniel Pinheiro computing, dancing, singing, video editing
Isabel Costa dancing, reading
Igor Stromajer {0§n–3¦é×F= Miá†} soundpoem in Portuguese
Outranspo – Lily Robert-Foley, Camille Bloomfield and Jonathan Baillehache reawriting
Jan de Weille reawriting
Rui Torres translation
Helen Varley Jamieson tchat queen
Anna Tolkacheva live video capturing
Public volunteers holding Isabel Costa upside down
All breathing

21/07 2017 10.15 PM, Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória, Porto,
Electronic Literature Organisation conference ELO 2017.

Announcement

Script .pdf

We nooses tous des bastardi elettronici che usano lingue globali cinematographic archive of the readingclub session.

Filed under: Collective writing, Conference / lecture, e-literature, Performance, Anna Tolkacheva, Annie Abrahams, Camille Bloomfield, Daniel Pinheiro, ELO 2017, Helen Varley Jamieson, Igor Stromajer, Isabel Costa, Jan de Weille, Jonathan Baillehache, Lily Robert-Foley, readingclub.fr, Rui Torres

unaussprechbarlich again

Next performance Unaussprechbarlich
Friday October 14, 21h, PATHOS Theater München in the festival “Magdalena München – In Between”.

The almost random mix of languages (there could be even more, others etc.) seamed to me very European as well as very contemporary. We today live a global Babel everywhere and anytime, in particular on the web and in the social net-works. A basic understanding of foreign languages is not any longer a pre-condition to communicate with each other. We all use on-line translators and Asian people use latin letters to be translated into their letters on the screen. So in your performance the mix of languages and the mix of representations by different media (pronunciation by humans and machines, typing, screening, projection, singing, etc.) transforms the global Babel into a piece of art. This piece of art is fluid, unstable, a collage of mixed layers, intuitive, enlightening, (un-)decodable and funny.
Christina Marie Pfeiffer on Unaussprechbarlich

Filed under: Performance, Annie Abrahams, Helen Varley Jamieson, language, unaussprechbarlich

unaussprechbarlich

A bulb, alleine mit die Sprache, immer die Sprache, Sprache im Kopf …

Kein …. recul, keine Ablösung

Die Konzentration

Gabel, Messer und Vogel

Gabel, Messer und Vogel

Eendjes op het water. Alles kan verdwijnen.

Kein Anker, Geister…

From October 31 till December 23rd 2015 I have been living in Villa Waldberta (Feldafing, Germany). In this period I worked with Helen Varley Jamieson on a project called unaussprechbarlich. We researched the difficulties and joys of communicating in a language that’s not our mothertongue: German.
Information for the performance we wanted to develop was accumulated on unaussprechbarlich.tumblr.com. Anecdotes, academic reflexions, personal stories, literature, artworks, text, text text.

After a try out at Villa Waldberta we did performances in Schwere-Reiter‘s Probaraum (December 4rd) and in Lothringer13‘s Rroom (December 9th).

More images: flickr.com/photos/bramorg/sets/72157662022985469

Helen was sitting at a table where she had two computers, two videoprojectors, a webcam, books and writing material. I was sitting amidst the public. The public heard Helen teaching herself German swearwords (Arschloch, Bergaufbremser) using an online guide to pronounciation (forvo.de). After 5 minutes I started singing Vader Jacob. followed by a personal story (in German) about my experiences with language learning. In the mean time Helen wrote German words related to the news on a paper by hand. This was projected. After my story I went to the microphone and read excerpts of Julia Kristeva’s book Etrangers à nous-mêmes in French. Helen transcribed this text in German in an online translation window, that was projected. The public read the text and the English translation at the same time. When finished Helen started to correct the text. I yelled: a loud cry. Helen continued, I went to a corner, turned my back to the public and started singing a definition of monolinguism ….

This describes the first 20 minutes. If you want to know more here are the Performance Script and Wall Texts in a .pdf.

Here is feedback on the third performance by Christina Maria Pfeifer.

Filed under: Performance, German, Helen Varley Jamieson, language, learning, unaussprechbarlich

ReadingClub – unaussprechbarlich

Ein online kollektives Schreibexperiment über
Die Schwierigkeiten und Freuden von Deutschlernen
mit
Igor Stromajer, Sandra Sarala, Helen Varley Jamieson und Annie Abrahams.

Das Publikum kann dieses poetische Battle live anschauen und kommentieren.
Klicken Sie bitte am 21. November ein bisschen vor 21 Uhr auf das Websitelink http://readingclub.fr.

Im Rahmen von Unaussprechbarlich, einem Forschungsprojekt, einer Website und einer Performanceserie von Annie Abrahams und Helen Varley Jamieson, wo die Künstlerinnen die eigene Dynamik von Sprachen erforschen und der Frage nachgehen, wie stark das, was wir unsere Kultur nennen, durch die Sprache geprägt ist.

Unaussprechbarlich wird ermöglicht durch eine Residenz in der Villa Walberta und die Unterstützung des Kulturreferats der LH München. Externer Berater : Horst Konietzny.

“You can join us in the ethereal weirdness of our non-native finger-activated tongues” Sandra Sarala

Filed under: Collective writing, networked performance, Helen Varley Jamieson, Igor Stromajer, Reading Club, ReadingClub, Sandra Sarala, unaussprechbarlich, Villa Waldeberta

empathy and intimacy in networked performances

propinquity, cross-reality, tele-presence, synaesthesia, ideasthesia

After reading Frans de Waal’s book on The Bonobo and the Athesist, I wondered if it would help me to better understand what is happening in networked webcam performance thinking about it in terms of empathy. So I wrote a status :

Would “empathy” be a word to describe what is needed (put at stake) in networked webcam performances?
The discussion this triggered made me realise a lot had happened since we organised the CyPosium in 2012. There seems to be a very lively bunch of people, with new approaches and ways of thinking, working in this field.

Participants :
Suzon Fuks – Waterwheel platform
Daniel Pinhero and Lisa Parra of LAND project
Helen Varley Jamieson – Upstage platform
Ienke Kastelein artist – performer
Martina Ruhsam performer – choreographer
Michael Baird musician
Roger Mills director of ethernet orchestra
Randall Packer of postREALITY.tv
Sara Malinarich from the Intact project
Jason Crouch of Contact Manchester
Jesse Ricke of CultureHub New York.

I screencaptured the whole thread and post it here as 12 .jpg’s. (interesting links to videos, discussions, academic approaches and practice)

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After the discussion we started a closed facebook group. If you are interested, please ask to join us, you are very welcome.

The propinquity effect is the tendency for people to form friendships or romantic relationships with those whom they encounter often, forming a bond between subject and friend. Feeling close in networked performance might depend on “the percieved feedback”.

The public can’t be an object/subject for empathy, there are too many different people inside it – empathic skills projected on a public easily become manipulative, become something else.

Physical distance between the persons performing and also between them and the persons watching does allow for intimacy in a very special way. Maybe the intimacy is even connected to a shared sense of awkwardness that the situation implies.

Empathy is a quality, a capacity of one person (as is intelligence, sensibility), not something between persons / it is the capacity “a receptiveness to the rhythms, energy, utterances of the other person” – it is a prerequisite for intimacy.

Rather than empathy it’s about a process of increasing synaesthesia.

What telepresents CAN NOT be present, but we cling stubbornly to this utopia. (Jorge Ruiz Abanades)

Maybe one day there will be another CyPosium …

Filed under: performance, cyposium, Daniel Pinheiro, empathy, Helen Varley Jamieson, Ienke Kastelein, Intimacy, Jason Crouch, Jesse Ricke, Jorge Ruiz Abanade, Lisa Parra, Martina Ruhsam, networked performance, propinquity, Randall Packer, Roger Mills, Sara Malinarich, Suzon Fuks, tele-presence