Dear all,

This is the first time I am writing something on this mailinglist. I (Annie
Abrahams, the artist of the Angry Women and Men, Huis Clos / No Exit and
other streaming performance projects) am on it for some time, but only read
posts occasionally.
This time I had to take time to try to formulate something. First thanks
Johannes for the expression "angry intimacy of the lonely collective". It
somehow hits a nail on its head.

As you might know I am not primarily interested in performance art, I am
interested in questions concerning machine mediated collaboration, in
communication in an environment without body presence, in how this changes
our behaviour and I use performance to help me think about it.
.
Of course Johannes is right pointing out streaming performances are not new
and have a long history. (Where to find a comprehensive timeline? - I am
ashamed I didn't know about ADAT before)
What is different is that nowadays, video chatting is part of almost
everyone's online life and so there is more than a technical incentive to
research this medium.

One of the important things about Low Lives, is that it tries to open up
webperformances to the regular art world and on the other side may help
regular performance artists think about what is specific about performing
using streaming. This means the festival contains a lot of performance that
only uses it as a performance venue, but there are also some exceptions.
Last year I did a performance called Theme Song -After Acconci. Acconci at
the time when he made Theme Song reflected in this work on the difference
between cinema and video in a time artists started using video, but when
videoart in galleries and museums wasn't accepted yet. By taking Acconci's
protocol and adding just a layer on the image with my telephone numbers I
tried to stress the difference in communication possibilities between 1964
and 2011. Unlike Acconci I was available directly for contact, the public
just had to call me. To my surprise nobody called but Helen Varley Jamieson
when the performance was almost over. Of course, I thought later (and
reading Sherry Turkle's book "Alone Together" confirmed this) telephone has
become an intimate, almost private and dangerous way to contact people.
This example to show you how in my work there is always an experimental
side in which I try to understand more about the possibilities and limits
of machine mediated communication.

It also illustrates an important issue in webperformance: Is it live? Isn't
it faked? Yes this time it was life. (Later when I showed the video of the
performance in the show Training for a Better World in the CRAC in Sète, I
had about two to three calls a week of amazed people checking if I really
used my own phone numbers)

But does it make a difference? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I have assisted
in webperformances that turned out to be videos. I didn't bother me because
I believed in the story and it could have been live (fake glitches, time
lapses etc. were carefully mounted in the video)

In my own work it always does make a difference. This is because I don't
tell stories, but do research :).  At the same time you can find lot of
videos of my performances online, why not? Some are proof or witnesses;
some have the status of stand-alone videos others of remixes or even
cinema. They are as real as the performance moments were, but they are
different.
In my performances the performers control their own image, and so, a
performance can also be staged as a live production of a video.
Sometimes I wonder if this might be the only thing that distinguishes it
from reality TV.

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)

When in 2006 I organised my first webperformances with panoplie.org we
decided not to archive the performance itself (the participating artists
could do that on their own if they wished) but instead to keep archives of
the chats during the performances - these chats being a second layer of
performance that witnessed at least as much of what had been happening as
the performance video.

Concerning Angry Women you can find online several short videos that serve
to exemplify certain behaviour, certain aspects of an attempt at
co-constructing a webcam performance about anger. (It could have been
about
another subject, but it is about anger). You can also find an 8 pages pdf
with the discussion between a group of participating ladies that followed
Take 4 of this project. You cannot find the complete version of Take 1 and
2
because they don't have a temporality that suits the internet.

So many thought and contradictions also in my mind. So many things your
mails triggered.

Thanks
Annie Abrahams
http://www.bram.org/angry/womenhttp://www.bram.org/huisclos/indexang.html

Ps Gretta Louw did a 10 day long complete immersion and availability
performance called Controlling Connectivity last November in Berlin. Some
of you might be interested. http://controllingconnectivity.tumblr.com/
I very much appreciated the interview fragments that I found on the DVD
that comes with her beautiful and interesting book.