L'un la poupée de L'autre.
One the puppet of the other.
Performance series by Annie Abrahams and Nicolas Frespech.
Technics and interface development Clément Charmet.
First performance May 26th 14h15, flashfestival, petite salle -1, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Video of 26 min.
Video stills.
The video has been presented on FreeboxTV 21 07 2007,
in the Cultural Center Saint-Exupéry in Reims during nuitnumérique#5, 20 10 2007,
at INTIMACY across digital & visceral performance Saturday 5.30 pm 8-12-2007 in Goldsmiths Small Hall, London, and
in "tout va bien", ESCA Gallery, Milhaud, November 23 till December 16, 2007,
in the CAC Le Quartier, Quimper, March 6th 2008, 19h30h. Invited by Ana Olszewska andt Elisabeth Klimoff (panoplie.org)
in ECM des Carrés, Annecy, November 13th 2008, 6pm. Proposition of Annie Aguettaz, imagespassages.
in the Lux, cinéplastique3, Valence, March 10th 2009, 8pm.
In the show Net Work by Gretta Louw, Platform, Munich, 3 November – 31 December 2014.
direct link http://youtu.be/a73ZmP3epaM |
l direct link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJf8JCtQY3E |
Video on youtube in two partss. Complete version on http://vimeo.com/2825201 (not for smartphones)
Video is also available as torrent p2p http://www.vuze.com/details/BMVJLODKWLSUBRFVX4FTKB2TB7BIDSVO.html and as.mov on DVblog.
Performance :
On the scene two igloo tents. Two spaces in the shape of a sphere will shelter the two artists who will devote themselves to a play in which they will be the others living doll.
Inside their tents they will be face to face via a system of two webcams. The public will be able to follow the hidden face to face via an interface that permits to project the webcam images of the two artists side by side on the wall behind the tents.
As in a virtual world (a video game, Second Life) the artists will give orders to their avatar played by the other. But contrary to what happens in the virtual world, here the alter ego is well alive. It has its own capacities and it can agree or not to give flesh to the projections of the other.
In this series of performances Annie Abrahams and Nicolas Frespech comment on the present situation where 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.
Each performance can be seen as a gesture that will reveal the play, and the perversities that result from it, between proximity and distance in Internet relations in a rather literal way.
10 min. in the middle of the performance. Image by Elisabeth Klimoff.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2294029240432878753
Press on the performance and the video :
"For the contact to be established, for the dialogue to begin, for the exchange to occur, they have to invent a new contact surface, a new skin. This epidermis that makes touch possible is sequentially and then simultaneously materialised by the tent tissue, by technological tools, by the fluxes of images and words. Finally, this skin that both of them seek to touch, this contact, will be neither a covering nor a support, but a construction, or to lend the terminology of D. Anzieu, an "apparatus". The dialogue as well as the images leads the spectator to the ontology of the gesture that exists before contact. Annie Abrahams and Nicolas Frespech focus on the birth itself of this gesture and on the resulting iconography. They propose a new trajectory of understanding contact, inciting the public to reflect upon all the possible interferences on the realisation of gesture. The puppet in this work is incarnated by their own bodies and in their constraint movements offering a contemporary version of the puppet of Heinrich von Kleist , crushing definitely the mythology of the Cyborg in order to return to being". "One the puppet of the other", unpublished article, Cyril Thomas, Art historian, Paris.
"The soft hazy pastels of the webcam images created an impression of otherworldliness, where the walls of the tents evoked two floating worlds, miles apart, occupied by two solitary humans preoccupied with opportunities for intimacy. In this enthralling half hour performance, I forgot about the accretion of skills, tools and protocols, necessary to enable the performance, so that all that remained for my conscious consideration was a contingent and vulnerable human interaction expressed through request, action, request, action. I found this work poignant and moving." Article by Ruth Catlow "intimate collaboration", festival/seminar "INTIMACY", London, 9-12-2007.
"Annie Abrahams et Nicolas Frespech, duo technosensible", Article in French by Annick Rivoire in poptronics, 20 10 2007.
"Murmures dans la nuit" Article in French by Troudiar for Fluctuat, 18-1-2008.
"Annie Abrahams, Nicolas Frespech, l’un l’entretien de l’autre" Interview Pop'etc, Poptronics, March 2008.
"Finally, and also under those conditions, Abrahams and Frespech exhibit their privacy. In a digital environment, privacy always runs a risk, and this risk is becoming greater and greater as technologies become more and more pervasive; but, if one exposes his/her privacy, the risk disappears. Authors laugh at their privacy by showing their own bodies and movements as public documents, by allowing the anonymous audience to access them. At the same time,
they suggest the possibility of living in a world where privacy is not a matter of concern any longer." "One the puppet of the other / L'un la poupée de l'autre: The video and the performance", Alejandro Delgado Gómez in Archives & Social Studies Vol 1 No 1 ISSN 1988-0626, 16 March 2008.
Necessary for the performance :
*2 tents igloo
*4 computers with Flash Player 8, Firefox, minimum System PC/Windows, Processor 1GHz, 512Mo RAM, connections RJ45. (one computer in each tent, two computers for the streaming and video projection)
*internet DSL connexion for the four computers RJ45 (minimum 1M)
*a video projector of good quality connected to a good sound system VGA connected to one of the "regie" computers resolution : 1024x768
*2 webcam
*2 headphones
Not taken care of by the artists 2 computers, internet connexion, video projector, cabling.
If you are interested in showing the video (subtitles in English) please contact Annie Abrahams at a (at) bram (dot) org.
more information .pdf