Reading/performing of Separation / Séparation (2003) New Years Eve, 19h15 CET in A Toast to the Flash Generation. Besides celebrating the end of an important creative period and showcasing the wonderful Flash e-lit collected by the Electronic Literature Organization in its Repository, this event also intends to document the flash poetry, narratives, & essays for posterity.
Ania Szremski* wrote about my 18 year old interactive poem for the New York based 4Columns website. During the spread of corona 4Columns continued to write on art and commissioned writing that addresses specifically works of culture that are still available in the public sphere, in one guise or another.
You must click repeatedly on the pale-yellow field of a pop-up window to get the narrative to unspool, word by word, its story of pain, the lament of one suffering body being taken over by another, demanding, unfeeling one. The suffering seems to be caused by the melding of human and computer, but it’s not totally clear who is suffering.
in Separation / Séparation, Abrahams anticipates our impatient behaviors and both goads us into them, so we become conscious of these automatic operations, and induces us to comport ourselves differently, to adopt a gentler attitude in front of the poor pounded-on computer.
That escape comes easiest through technology, but not here: Abrahams bars the door to fugitive, algorithmic reprieve.
Ania Szremski is the managing editor of 4Columns. From 2011–15, she was the chief curator of Townhouse, a nonprofit contemporary art space in Cairo, Egypt; she was also a founding editor of Mada Masr, Egypt’s premiere platform for independent, progressive journalism. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
ps I found the Italian translation in a powerpoint version + plus the article that relates the difficulties of recreating a flash piece without sources.
Published in Ada Issue #8. Ada is a journal of gender new media and technology.
“This paper is concerned with the examination of rule-guided cultural and thematic battles enacted by women writers in two historical moments—the late nineteenth- and early twenty-first centuries—against the dominant cultural institutions of their time. Such battles, evaluated in the Anglophone world of letters at large, bring to light women’s often inconspicuous strategies for legislating new mechanisms of written expression within the established authoring and reading practices of their times.
Both the mobility-limited late nineteenth century society and the apparently digitally-democratized twenty-first century seem to call for female writing subjects, who are often seen at the margins of the “social factory,” to intervene through specific literary acts of disturbance. Such acts of disturbance, when closely analyzed, can be seen as both exposing and altering the rule-based systems in which these authors are confrontationally embedded.
……
In envisioning the routes of such processes of imagination-based social practices moving from the ideally American radiating center, Dutch e-literature author Annie Abrahams, who has been living in France since 1987, and Australian codework poet Mary-Anne Breeze (also known as Mez) can be seen as modern Anglophone literary catalysts of the instances of the previously discussed nineteenth-century American writers such as Alcott, Phelps, Blake, and Jewett in a world increasingly imposing norms and standards both in digital labor and language-based technological expressions. Our brief analysis of works such as Abrahams’s Separation/Séparation or Mez’s _cross.ova.ing 4rm.blog.2.log 07/08 highlights how female electronic writing seems both to update the abovementioned three elements detected in the women’s career literature and translate them into the pragmatic dimension of digitally-mediated language expression.”
Mauro Carassai and Renata Morresi made an Italian powerpoint and javascript translation (2012) of Separation/Séparation (2002). They didn’t have the flash source codes and so imagined how translation of this piece of E-lit could be done from its experience alone.
That’s what time can, will do with a piece of electronic art, I thought. E-lit also is like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.
MTAA’s Physical Bookmarks for Vintage Net Art Created Before Facebook (BF-2004), 2015
5 x 6 inch etched vinyl on panel, no edition, $125 each (175 euro).
Tinjail – You, 2001
MTAA – MTAA’s Working Process, 1998
G.H. Hovagimyan – Homepage, 1999
Yael Kanarek – World of Awe, 2000
Annie Abrahams – Séparation/Separation, 2002 Vuk Ćosić – Ascii History of Art for the Blind, 1998
I am happy to be part of this exposition curated by Ania Szremski.
The emotional impact of working (or being unable to work) in this context has shifted our institutional and curatorial thinking. “Ugly Feelings” is a first step towards reflecting on that shift, a gesture towards a project that will manifest in 2014 asking if an institution can create an exhibition without an artist.
20/10-20/11/2013
Opening reception Sunday, October 20, 7 pm Townhouse First Floor Gallery, Cairo.
… “The current Townhouse tackles feelings of frustration and despair dominating Egypt’s transitional process, exploring how art institutions can continue to function in such challenging times.” … “I had originally wanted to show Moving Excerpts, as well as Separation in an Internet café exhibition in 2011 called ‘Talk to Me’, which was cancelled due to the events of Mohamed Mahmoud,” Szremski remembered, “then I felt that they made a lot of sense in the context of ‘Ugly Feelings’ and I was happy to have the chance to finally show them in Egypt.” … Yasmine Zohdi in the article Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery embraces ‘Ugly Feelings’ on ahramonline
“The very first piece in the lineup, Annie Abrahams’ Flash poem “Separation/Séparation,” strikingly emphasizes both the bodily and geographic dimensions of literary creation and reception. Inspired by the author’s experience of repetitive-strain injury, the poem is designed to reinforce ergonomic guidelines aimed at preventing such injuries. Clicking too quickly or forcefully invokes the error message, “You don’t have the right attitude in front of your computer,” and the poem periodically pauses to lead the reader through stress-reduction exercises. While the central focus of Abrahams’ piece is the computer user’s fraught relationship with the machine, by providing English and French versions of the work, Abrahams, a Dutch artist working in France, also underscores the powerful but often under-recognized role of a language – “native,” “national,” “other,” “foreign” – in situating us in relation to whatever we read, even when that situation amounts to a separation due to our inability to comprehend. As do many of the texts in Volume 2, “Separation/Séparation” encodes the coordinates of its creation in the form of the different human languages it engages.”
“…Other works aim to draw attention to that greater ‘link’ back to the body operating the computer. Some of the works seem to understand the computer (a laptop or a desktop) as a kind of furniture, one we may have become too comfortable with. After clicking impatiently several times to get the next word of a poem revealed in this way, Annie Abraham’s English/French work separation/séparation informs, alternatively, ‘Vous n’avez pas le bonne attitude devant l’ordinateur’ / ‘You do not have the right attitude in front of your computer.’ I am instructed to do an exercise demonstrated on the screen, ‘Open your eyes as wide as possible and lift your eyebrows for five seconds’; a bar appears on the screen indicating the elapsed and remaining time. A bit later, another punishment/exercise requires standing up, and as I am doing so I notice a large orange painting on the wall of the room I am in. I had registered it before, but realise then that I had never looked at it for any length of time. The composer Edgar Varèse once said that the greatest pleasure the radio gave was turning it off. The same could be said of electronic literature and clicking Shut Down…”
“The game and dialogue among artist, machine, and reader facilitates a general reflection on the role of the body in processes of reading and writing.”
February 2011, College Park, Maryland: Electronic Literature Organization
ISSN: 1932-2011
Editors : Laura Borràs, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley and Brian Kim Stefans
The Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two has been published (with identical contents) on the web and on DVD-ROM. This dual publication is intended to allow the volume to reach the broadest audience possible and to provide for reading, classroom use, sharing, and reference on and off the network. Anyone can request a free DVD-ROM from: Electronic Literature Organization / Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) / B0131 McKeldin Library / University of Maryland / College Park, MD 20742.
Entrée libre le MOTif
6 Villa Marcel Lods Paris 19° M° Belleville
Le Marché de la poésie et le Bipval se sont associés pour, dans le cadre des périphéries du marché de la poésie, présenter quatre créateurs qui ont su s’emparer de l’informatique pour proposer de nouvelles approches d’écriture.
Avec Jean-Pierre Balpe, directeur du Bipval, les artistes Philippe Boisnard, Emmanuel Rabu et Annie Abrahams.
Bientôt! Entretien au sujet de Distant Movements Annie Abrahams, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau, Alix de Morant, Dabiel Pinheiro, Muriel Piqué, p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-eCréation Research Vol.6 | 2022.
8 oktober 2023 tot en met 1 april 2024, Being Human presented in REBOOT, Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.
Constallationssswith Alice Lenay, Pascale Barret, Alix Desaubliaux et occasionellement Gwendoline Samidoust et Carin Klonowski.
Rule-guided Expression: Gender Dissent across Mediated Literary Works
John Zuern on 
net art, video, performance 
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