Johannes Biringer wrote : "What temporalities suit the internet?
(Annie Abrahams)  Annie argues:  "For me the most important aspect of
the "live" issue is the way it relates to control and power. Life
performance always means accepting one's own vulnerability, the
possibility of mistakes, errors, breaks, failure, etc. This absence of
total control leads to extra excitement for the public (whether online
or offline)"

is this a point made on behalf of improvisation (and old point, thus,
and not necessarily a historically convincing argument on behalf of
breaks, glitches and failures.  What is it that excites you about
break downs? what is so sexy about vulnerabiltity  (claimed also by
body artists and then it becomes a promotional engine to highlight the
so called vulnerable body, yes?). But then again, what is interesting
about the claim you make?  why would that lead to extra excitement in
the public?  what excites the users about bad YouTube clips?  i have
no idea.  Is anyone excited about bad & boring YouTube clips, and
given the innumerable flood of things getting posted to the internet
every day, who cares?

No one called, Annie?    hmm, perhaps one should not be surprised."

Dear Johannes,


The last week I spend trying to formulate something about the backgrounds
of my performance practice. I will copy some of the text I wrote and I hope
you will understand what is interesting to me.


"Texts by Sherry Turkle, Brad Troemel, Boris Groys, Jacques Rancière,
Michael Goddard on Guattari and Berardi, I have read recently, helped me to
understand my webcam performances to reveal ordinary, vulnerable and messy
aspects of human communication besides being a tool to experiment machine
mediated collaboration and communication.



In her book  *Alone Together* Sherry Turkle [1] describes how we hide more
and more behind technology, how intimate communications start being
something to avoid rather than to look for, how smartphones help us to flee
our fear for the other, how we learn to control our relations via
interfaces and how we are adapting our behaviour to this new situation.
Facebook for instance teaches us how to simulate intimacy, how to make
relations easy, clean, and without danger. Brad Troemel in *Why You Should
Make Yourself Someone Else Online* (page 98), essay no 11 in his book Peer
Pressure  argues along the same lines: “*The process of image management on
facebook is already less an outpouring of expression than it is an exercise
in omission of information about one’s self*”.

So these relations also become superficial and makes us ask: Who are we
when we don’t perform? Why can’t we show our vulnerable, messy sides? Why
can’t I be boring and cherish solitude anymore?


How can we aim for a Better, Happier World if we don't allow ourselves to
exist, if we are not ready to affront our sloppy sides and take them as a
departure point for our thinking and actions. How can we pretend to change
a world if we are not even capable of looking honestly at ourselves?

Maybe we should answer Guattaris question: “*Why have the immense
processual potentials bought forth by the revolutions in information
processing, telematics, robotics, office automation, biotechnology and so
on, so far only led to a monstrous reinforcement of earlier systems of
alienation, an oppressive mass-media culture and an infantilising politics
of consensus?*".



Maybe we should pay less attention to change and say with Boris Groys that "
*…**change is our status quo. Permanent change is our only reality. And in
the prison of permanent change, to change the status quo would be to change
the change—to escape the change*."

Maybe this will be possible if we could be more interested in what he calls
*weak visibility and weak public gestures*. Maybe our humanity can be saved
through an attention for simple daily, repetitive always returning actions,
for never changing affects and desire.



Maria Chatzichristodoulou also touched upon this in the article she wrote
about my show at HTTP (now Furtherfield) gallery in 2010
"*Abrahams's**Still Life
** is commonplace, messy and malleable. It is about the 'banal' reality of
everyday life, time passing by, people crossing paths in fractured,
desperate or indifferent attempts to communicate. This everyday quality
opens up Abrahams's Shared Still Life to movement, dust, miscommunication,
and shared absence.*"


In a society where authenticy and privacy become endangered it is important
to find ways to access our vulnerabilities and doubts, to make them public,
to cherish our messy side, to make place for the beast in the beauty, to go
back to reality, to claim the human. "We need to trap reality in order to
make it available for thought." (paraphrasing Jaques Rancière)"

What is exciting about it  doesn't necessarily excite.
Annie

dear all
>
>
> very interesting points now raised by Sakrowski, about limited capacities  to curate (Guggenheim's capacity to select from thousands and thousands of submissions to them) – and I assume the question of capacity also concern platforms, servers, clouds, storage media, archives, libraries, librarians, minds,  and thus the arthistorians' capabilities of overlooking/analyzing the "field" ;  and this is also of course what many of us think curators (museums) do - looking over and at fields and practices. And how do curators look/listen?
>
>  I always wanted to ask that question here, and this is a good moment, no?
>
> Where do the choosers and selectors and commissioners and sourcers  [sorcerers?] (we remember Simon Biggs's posts here on the soon-to-be 'Remediating the Social' exhibition/festival/performance/installation-network event [again it's becoming too hybrid to write with words..........] as part of "Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) project"...... ] go when they source?
> where do they send their crawlers?   and can we trust any museum of the future to have anything to say along the authoritative lines that museum/art history once claimed?
>
> >>..Sakrowski schreibt:
>
> But back to the comparison of "old" broadcast and the net based broadcasts.
> The new net based broadcasts have a strong multimedia quality - with a blend of film, sound, text, graphic, animation and interactivity (video response, live chat, text comment [including links]). If we understand a web link as a cut in film, then we could say that we are building up a our own stream/broadcast with multiple page visits in a browsing session . We  don't follow one authors perspective/narration, we follow/create more a flow or a stream of collective consciousness … …
> >>
>
>
> I would argue that this is surely an interesting point, to speak of amalgamations and flows and concatenations in "net-based" art or broadcasts, a point well taken and in need of careful exploration;  also along historical lines, worth scrutinizing (to come back to the above issue of curating and selecting -- thanks for the responses over the last few days, a rich discussion and also illuminating the gaps that are inevitably and necessarily open up, there are only ever histories (in the plural) and different time lines, and I don't trust time lines.  I think Tatiana mentioned the importance of looking at the policies and politics of curating  (and decentralization).......Many thanks to the responses, and Ghislaine's reference to "On the Move", and the interviews and reports gathered there. Ghislaine's essay tracing a "personal pathway through creative collaborations in performance telematics  since 1997"  is excellent;   and we need such histories and stories from practition
> ers of course, so Annie's mentioning of not knowing ADaPT is not a problem at all, why would anyone know of ADaPT, say, outside the emerging dance and technology network in the 90s and early 2000s, where networked dancing (as networked music performance again today, still-pursued with seriousness and precision, for example, by Pedro Rebelo at SARC in Belfast and their partners in California....) became a short-lived interest, before many of us reallized it doesn't make all that much sense to "dance in the network."?    Confluences and experiments, mesh-ups and collaborations (and collaborative producing, yes, and collabiorative research, for sure) of course were enabled further and encouraged to some extent by the new social networks, and the growth of http://www.dance-tech.net as a platform/forum is just one example of many of these efforts -- the dance-tech.net platform now has its own TV channels, and my
>  DAP-Lab its own livestream platform where we can stream our Research Seminars and Performance Workshops,  not knowing of course whether anyone would bother listen to go back to them once they are archived and accessible 24/7 and what does that mean today, accessible 24/7?   in the age of digital and internet television and radio, what does it mean to put a dance or a live performance on the internet?
>
> And what would we make of the chats?  the "histories" of subtextual chat conversations during a live stream?   these resonancers?  (Caroline raised the questions of whether chats have any resonance). I'd say, little if any.
>
>
> >>
> In my opinion it is important to have or create a concerned community around streaming performance.Watching a live stream can be, and almost always is a very lonely experience and so there has to be a strong incentive otherwise you won't. One way to achieve this concern might be to open up the process us much as possible.>> (Annie Abrahams)
>
> is the random (and sometimes crazily disconnected/disconcerting) chatting during a live networked performance worth archiving and reproducing?  i would think not, although it may help to be some sort of empirical and ethnographic data if you were to analyze the apparent resonators  and social factors surrounding or "flowing" into a networked event?  [and see below]
>
> How many narratives would we get, recounting the chats that happened during ephemeral live networked events that may have happened?  Who would read these accounts?  how would this accrue to a new "oral culture" of  or about the "experience" of live performances if they happened? (Caroline Langill  mentioning "Distribution is as much about documentation as it is about dissemination" and the Chris Burden "Shoot" example and the photographs of a witnessed event.....).
>
> well, I still love the sceptical questions raised by Adrian George (ed) 2003, "Art, Lies and Videotape:  Exposing Performance," (Tate, Liverpool) -- the book is based on an exhibition that examines and questions the "constructedness" of the post (the live after the life).
>
>
> What temporalities suit the internet?   (Annie Abrahams)  Annie argues:  "For me the most important aspect of the "live" issue is the way it relates to control and power. Life performance always means accepting one's own vulnerability, the possibility of mistakes, errors, breaks, failure, etc. This absence of total control leads to extra excitement for the public (whether online or offline)"
>
> is this a point made on behalf of improvisation (and old point, thus, and not necessarily a historically convincing argument on behalf of breaks, glitches and failures.  What is it that excites you about break downs? what is so sexy about vulnerabiltity  (claimed also by body artists and then it becomes a promotional engine to highlight the so called vulnerable body, yes?). But then again, what is interesting about the claim you make?  why would that lead to extra excitement in the public?  what excites the users about bad YouTube clips?  i have no idea.  Is anyone excited about bad & boring YouTube clips, and given the innumerable flood of things getting posted to the internet every day, who cares?
>
> No one called, Annie?    hmm, perhaps one should not be surprised.
>
> And to return to  Sakrowski, may i suggest that the oral culture brought into our perspectives here by Caroline, is not to be neglected historically, and I'd argue that what you think of as the strength of the "new" broadcast network media, I consider their weakness and essential diffusedness;
> i believe the social networks and YouTubes and Livestreams and Low Lives cannot at all compete with nor supplant the more viscerally embodied and ingrained lived theatrical cultures and ritual cultures and music cultures and dance cultures and sporting cultures that sustained themselves precisely through the communal gossip or conversational and emotional and intellectual social (and class specific and ethnically inflected) direct-encounters/exchanges that inevitably happen in live ritual events - where we had gathered and where we will have gathered during our limited life times.
>
> Now you will have to argue that you gather in the ether with others at remote sites.
>
> I doubt very much that i shall look back and remember the 2000s as the era where we gathered at (our home) computer terminals typing excited and angry chat words, yearning signals and missives from our angry intimacy to the lonely collective out there, the cravers and desirers  and asserters and lurkers so extraordinarily captured and deconstructed  in the melancholic  "music" that Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen made out of the chatrooms of the internet with their perverse search engines (in the digital installation "Listening Post") [see for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD36IajCz6A)?
>
> " I am nice,  I am 26.  I am hot.  I am 14.  I am freezing.  I am tired... I am going.   I am from Latvia.     I am.   I am here.    I am from.     I am doing fine.   I am fully awake.    I am in Pennsylvania.  I am comfortable with my assertions.
> I am an east sider.....  I am stumpy.    i am an artist .... I am a professional killer ... I am bored... I am not repeating..."     (cited from "Listening Post")
>
>
> what a fine remediation of the social..
>
>
> with regards
>
> Johannes Birringer
> DAP-Labhttp://www.brunel.ac.uk/daphttp://www.aliennationcompany.com
>
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-- 

Documentation of Huis Clos / No Exit - On Translation
Video, reactions of the performers and the public, photos and  the
performance protocol
http://bram.org/huisclos/ontranslation/indexfr.html

Article IF NOT YOU NOT ME, ANNIE ABRAHAMS AND LIFE IN NETWORKS,
Maria Chatzichristodoulou in Digimag 54 May 2010
http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1793