 |
 |
Annie I am so excited to hear about this. I return again and again to the book After Criticism edited by Gavin Butt to try to make sense of lists through performed or enacted modes of art criticism/reflection. I'm fascinated by the idea of trying to work through email-based exchange by performing it. I can imagine also that performance could add the nuance and context a list text is missing after it's 'moment', after the time in which it was part of a dynamic exchange. I'm thinking here again of Alexei's net.art email and whether performing sets of discussions from different lists around this time would place it in a different light. Would it be easier to see it's playfulness I wonder. And would it be easier in a performance to put such an email in context, show how it was part of a set of activities designed to problematise the concept of art history¡¦.Certainly it must have been cathartic for you, but I'm enjoying musing on list as script¡¦ From: Annie Abrahams <[log in to unmask]> Date: Sunday, 6 October 2013 19:23 To: Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]> Cc: CRUMB List <[log in to unmask]> Subject: performance as a way to access - re enact mailing lists Hi All This might be a bit of a side way, but I am reacting to Charlotte's remark on using performance to give an impression of the lived experience ... From 1997 to 1999 we worked with a group of artists on collectively managed website called lieudit. (it was in French) It was an exciting and very interesting experience, but we split up and took all the work offline after an official art institution got interested in our work and we couldn't agree on how to react to this (I have the habit of throwing away old mails every now and then, so I can't give exact info, but as I remember it, we didn't even really discuss anything, it was plain war) In 2005 after I discovered that the wayback machine had kept quit some files, and so I wrote to all members to tell them that in a certain way we still existed and I also proposed to put online our own archives again. A few months of even more traumatising email exchange followed and the only way I could cope with that afterwards was to imagine I had participated in the writing of a theater piece. To heal myself I decided to arrange the email exchange as such and to plan a reading. Some participants refused to give me the right to do so and finally I had to organize the reading behind closed doors with about 30 invited guests. I still have the theater piece, but the only thing public is a photo you can find here http://www.bram.org/special/provitesti/indexang.htm <http://www.bram.org/special/provitesti/indexang.htm> I do think staging interesting sections of mailinglist exchanges will produce interesting insights in mailinglist dynamics, but as you all know, it won't be what happened then ... I am almost sure there are other examples of mailinglist enactments ... Best Annie Abrahams What I mean by that - and it > relates to Josephine Bosma©ös point about further researching the dynamic > of online discourse - is that what we value and what informs our thinking > and practice is often not traceable in the archive because it©ös within the > taking part, it©ös in the moment. It©ös in the lived experience of > interacting with certain people, on certain platforms in certain ways. > This is something that needs to come out. We need to find a way to > describe not just what happened and when, but also give some kind of > flavour of the particular experience involved - but how do we describe > that? Do theories of performance offer an excellent model to tease out > these types of experience/engagement? <http://www.bram.org> http://aabrahams.wordpress.com <http://aabrahams.wordpress.com> http://metalogues.tumblr.com/ <http://metalogues.tumblr.com/> http://readingclub.fr <http://readingclub.fr>