"Conflicting cues about a particular situation"
Artist talk by Annie Abrahams.

Škuc Gallery, Stari trg 21, Ljubljana.
Monday, 15 December 2008 at 8 PM http://intima.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/annie-abrahams/

Invitation by Intima Virtual Base, in collaboration with Škuc Gallery Ljubljana.

annie abrahams
Annie Abrahams : artist, art operator.
 

Double Bind Web performances - follow up of Breaking Solitude meetings.

As a biologist I learned Double Bind to be a situation with no exit, in either choice one looses=>illogical, inhibited, ambivalent, misplaced behaviour. Double Bind is the result of conflicting cues about a particular situation. An animal that cannot decide between attack and flight is going to eat or scratch.
Does "double bind" describe our actual relation to technology? http://2008.panoplie.org/DoubleBind
Propositions:
Pascal Lièvre reads a page of Foucault's Discipline and Punish / Surveiller Punir, while attached to his friend Mathieu, who reads the same page. Their "échec" to read together in the same pace shows us the limitations of the machine power?
The K.Kliniques sing, cry, whisper their disconcerting foolishness while they try to be in one and the same space where there is not enough room for two, ignoring the empty space just besides.
Julien Lassort, assisted by Agnès de Cayeux, shows a clown, a Pierrot, sensible, twofold, man and woman: robotised. Pierrots are generally know for their sadness and trusting naïveté, their oblivion to reality and their distant and moonstruck character.
Renee Turner promises "Postcards from her desktop" and cites Derrida : "I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply." She wrote to me : "I think maybe it's about our desire for language to be simple, to write simply (a transparent one to one relation between experience and language), and yet language in its evasions often complicates or obscures.  The postcard embodies the desire to compress an experience, make it somehow tangible on a small card.  It is an impossible project.  But one that I find quite fascinating.  :-)  "

Let's have a look. http://2008.panoplie.org/DoubleBind/salon

The archives of Double Bind contain only images and the text of the tchat, the part not controlled by the artist! (Creates a Double Bind situation for the artist? freedom - control)

It's all about our relation to the mediating machine.
Séparation Machine Body relation (The virtual object of the art work, the behaviour of the visitor, is at the center of the esthetical contemplation.)
The Big Kiss A possible new communication space? New behavioural codes, new language? Creation of a surface of interaction and an interface a communal acting. Drawing with the tongue.
One the puppet of the other with Nicolas Frespech in Centre Pompidou Paris.
"we tend more and more to live in our own bubble, our own sphere, without need for the other, by forming a couple with our virtual doubles" ?
Foam society (Sloterdijk) "Persons living each one in their own bubble as if in a kind of foam where all is moving. Connecting surfaces with the other bubbles are porous and let enter certain information, but not others. Conglomerates are formed, disintegrate according to the requirements of the moment. Not the image of a network where all is connected by lines, but an image of a fragile cluster reflects best our current situation" (translation of a text soon published in Mercure 4, Paris)

Experiments in collective writing :

E-solitude : Internet un espace public de solitude. Internet a tool to reveal "la condition humaine"? SolitudeS "Solitude shared, is solitude diminished and multiplied". Lora McPhail in netartreview. Shared writing experiences are meetings in a new social space. The result, the written text doesn't conform established rules and codes of writing.

New? A cartography of the other? A rhetorical form of the collective voice? A staggering beginning for a language of the multitude?
Re-affectisation by reading the texts aloud, by finding other ways to extract them from their existence as light on a screen and data on a server. ViolenceS

"We walk on a path that has innumerable junctions. Where ever one goes, everywhere there are abysses on its sides. It is at the same time alarming and promising  to know that nothing will ever be repeated, that all will always be different. We are all alone, really alone. There is nobody who follows exactly the same road as you do. Whatever your choices at the points of intersection, never you can really approach the other.  A few moments ago this foreigner was near and already now this person is out of sight. Or it is beside you for a very long time, to suddenly change direction at a always unforeseen moment. You are on a unpredictable journey in an infinite network. Invisibly your pathroad depends on that of the other and the other way around. Each one of your choices influences the network in  its entirety. Each thing you make or say changes the circumstances and thus the possible choices of the others.
But what you think remains yours. In your brain the processes develop according to a system with the similar peaks and abysses. Your thoughts seek a road between the order and chaos. They travel always findings new landscapes for which your co-travellers in reality determine  the conditions. And if you want to the others to know something of this intimate space, you will have to repeat it a thousands times and still you will run the risk not to be understood.
Repetition increases the chance that your choice will echo till the borders of the network, but you also take the risk to collapse the landscape, until now full with surprises, into a monotonous desert" text written in 91/92

PeurS FearS : Oppera Internettikka - Protection et Sécurité 2006 Montpellier, 2008 New Museum New York
Annie Abrahams and the All Star GirlsBand 13 French Ladies with connexions to art and the internet read phrases about fear in front of the mostly masculine audience of e-poetry 2007.

Am I an artwork? Yes, no, maybe.

To develop strategies of diversion, of protection, of sheltering, of underground revolt and living, acquire eel or wandering ant properties.

Insult me! (not)

I don't want to be a nice girl

 

Annie Abrahams
Articles, biographie etc. http://www.bram.org/info/index.htm
Overview in French: http://artisteslr.fr/index2.html?artiste=abrahams
News, blog
http://aabrahams.wordpress.com