Conversations between Antye Greie and Annie Abrahams

Duet - Satz 1, 2, 3 et 4
deuxième partie de Conversations between Antye Greie (aka AGF) et Annie Abrahams
une série de Domestic Streaming Performances
Projet soustenu par L'espace Multimédia Gantner

Antye Greie in Hailuoto and Annie Abrahams in Montpellier

La relation n'existe pas, elle devient. / The relation doesn't exist, it comes into being.
Pas de répétition. Des protocoles simples. / No rehearsals. Simple protocols.

Archives

13 décembre 19h Respiration / Breathing video (19.44 min) Satz1.txt chat

14 décembre 19h Le Quotidien / Daily life video (11.07 min) Satz2.txt chat

15 décembre 19h La Famille / Der Familie video (28.16 min) .txt chat

16 décembre 19h Rêves / Utopia / Dreams video (5.65 min) .txt chat

Watch Duet - Satz 1, 2, 3 et 4 - chatroom archive video in HD on Vimeo.

Reactions : Margarida Carvalho On Duet - Satz, A letter to Annie. Margarida Carvalho is lecturer at the School of Communication and Media Studies (Lisbon Polytechnic Institute).

Dear Annie,

Here are some notes and scattered thoughts on the project Duet - Satz. As I told you, I was only able to watch in real time the performance Duet - Satz 2, Daily Life. I missed the first performance, not because I wasn't waiting for it, since I was - connected computer, headphones on and an expectant look - but because I was mismatched in time, a result of the confusion I made between Paris time and Lisbon time. After a few minutes: "the surface is black when we are not streaming." The darkness of the screen settled as an index of your absence: Annie and Antye passed by in a meeting that I failed, in a time that was not mine. As I spend so many hours connected to the Internet, on this side of the screen, I tend to forget time zone differences; online time sometimes seems elastic to me. Retrospectively, and after watching the video records of the various performances that compose the Duet project, I thought how curious it was that the mismatch in time and space, due to a misunderstanding on my part, marked my first Duet reception.

Yet, in the second performance (Duet - Satz 2, Daily Life), clocks coincided. Everyday life was the theme, the day to day of Annie and Antye, guided by lists of shopping to do, especially in the supermarket. The minimalism of the topic - purchase of goods, trips to the supermarket, the daily toil of everyday life - took shape in the utterances of lists, prices and actions (spoken in English in case of Antye) and in French and English (Annie). The translation (its difficulty) came back, in this performance, as a game of repetition (of the difference) [1].

As I was watching the four performances on Vimeo's archive, I've noticed how Duet - Satz 2, Daily Life and Duet - Satz 3, La Famille have color image and focus on the everyday dimensions of affections, the daily life and the family, while Duet - Satz 1, Breathing and Duet - Satz 4, Utopia │ Dreams are in black and white and fall into a more poetic and allegorical register. Something, however, is common to this series: their willingness of plastic and relational experimentation undoes the "spectacle" on the screen and allows us to experience, in an intimate and poetic way, what is to "be in relation to", in what it has of gift, proximity, failure and mismatch.

In fact I think that the series Duet - Satz as well as the first series MeetingS - ConversationS work on the idea of affect as perception of our existence in the world, our vitality and becoming, and so, too, of our ability to create and share other times and spaces. Affect implies bodies and, as it makes them porous, it also moves through the intercorporeal world. Maybe that's why I find it so appropriate the coordination between breathing and the occupy movement that you weave in Duet - Satz 1, Breathing. "Occupy breath," that is, "occupy one's own body" is a principle of performative and political rupture with the spectacle of the manipulation of the affections, typical to the dominant neoliberalism, which leaves us precisely "breathless", able to spend money but no time, immersed in permanent crisis and alertness.

Thus, countering the affective encoding and easy connection, it is not surprising that the series Duet - Satz ends with the performance Utopia │ Dreams after Rimbaud, such a rambling and fearless poet, who never ceased to remind us that it's time we feel it differently.

Yours,

Margarida [2]

[1] I believe I never told you that I understand French relatively well, although I don't speak it fluently.
[2] Margarida Carvalho is lecturer at the School of Communication and Media Studies (Lisbon Polytechnic Institute)

Article : Trapped to Reveal – On webcam mediated communication and collaboration : An exposition concerning my collaborative webcam performance projects, focussing on / trying to determine the special aspects of machine mediated communication and collaboration. Published in the Journal for Artistic Research An online, peer-reviewed journal for the publication and discussion of artistic research.

In August 2010 Annie and Antye did A Meeting is a Meeting is a Meeting - a first series of 9 Domestic Streaming Performances.

"... we explicitly challenge one another. We push each other towards new terrains, and into unknown, unrehearsed actions. We did not aim to produce an intimate encounter for this work, but the fact that we enter unknown realms makes it intimate because we cannot control the image of ourselves that we broadcast to the public. For this performance we both accept a discomforting prerequisite: something that we don't want others to know about us, something secret, will, no doubt, escape. The moment this condition of discomfort suddenly and unexpectedly occurs is maybe one of the most intimate moments one can share: when a secret escapes during a performance, the minute it reveals itself to us and to our observers, this secret cannot but be unstaged. It is a moment of nakedness within the performance."
Annie Abrahams on "A Meeting is a Meeting is a Meeting" in "Allergic to Utopias",
interview for Digimag 58, October 2010 by Maria Chatzichristodoulou.

Antye Greie http://www.poemproducer.com/
Digital songwriter, sound composer and poet - Born 1969 in East Germany lives and works in Hailuoto, Finland. Known also as AGF. Focus of work includes the relationship between language and sound, audiovisual live performance, digital communication, sound installations and commissions for movies and theater. Throughout her career, Greie has released 20 long player records and numerous collaborations under such aliases as AGF/Delay (with Vladislav Delay), Greie Gut Fraktion (with Gudrun Gut), and The Lappetites (with Kaffe Matthews and Eliane Radigue), many collaborations with the award-winning classical composer Craig Armstrong. Greie also runs her own production company, AGF Producktion, and has produced records for other artists, including Ellen Allien (SOOL, 2009, BPitch).

Compositeur Digital et poète - Né en 1969 en Allemagne de l'Est vit et travaille à Hailuoto, en Finlande. Connu aussi comme AGF. L'objet de son travail comprend la relation entre le langage et le son, audiovisuel live performance, la communication numérique, des installations sonores et des commissions pour les films et le théâtre. Tout au long de sa carrière, Greie a publié 20 disques et a participé à de nombreuses collaborations sous des pseudonymes tels que AGF / Delay (avec Vladislav Delay), Fraktion Gut Greie (avec Gudrun Gut), et The Lappetites (avec Kaffe Matthews et Eliane Radigue), et avec le compositeur classique Craig Armstrong. Greie dirige également sa propre société de production, AGF Producktion, et a produit des enregistrements pour d'autres artistes, notamment Ellen Allien (Sool,2009, BPitch).

Annie Abrahams http://www.bram.org
Docteur en biologie (Université d’Utrecht 1978) et diplômée de l’école des Beaux-Arts d’Arnhem (1986). Son travail, qui utilise aussi bien la vidéo, la performance que l’Internet, questionne les possibilités et les limites de la communication, dont elle explore plus spécifiquement les modalités propres au réseau. Elle est internationalement reconnue en tant que pionnière de la performance en réseau. Elle a fait beaucoup de performances et a largement exposé son travail en France, y compris au Centre Pompidou, à Paris et dans de nombreuses galeries internationales, dont le Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center à Asheville, North Carolina, US ; Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castelló, Espagne; le New Musem à New York; Furtherfield gallery (formerly HTTP), Londres; le NIMk à Amsterdam et dans des festivals internationaux comme le Moscow Film Festival, le Festival international du film de Rotterdam et Stuttgarter Filmwinter, et sur des plateformes en ligne comme Rhizome.org et Turbulence. Du 28 octobre 2011 au 1 janvier 2012 le Crac de Sète lui consacrera une exposition personnelle sous le titre Training for A Better World

Décalages, interruptions, coupures, variations de flux, vides temporaires et erreurs de codage dans et entre les sons et les images, sont les matériaux esthétiques qui traduiront nos possibles et nos limites dans nos capacités d'être ensemble dans un
environnement cyberisé.
Shifts, interruptions, cuts, flux variations, temporary vacuums and coding errors in and between the images, are the aesthetic materials of the performance that will translate the possibilities and the limits of our capacities to be together in a cyberized environment.
L'erreur n'existe pas. / Failure doesn't exist.