Hi list members,

As an artist living in France, I had to come across Filliou. It is hard not
to. All art students learn about his work. But I did art school in Holland
and it was only later on, when, living here in France, I met Ben Vautier,
Jean Dupuy and Pierre Tilman, who are all somehow influenced by him, that I
got interested in his work. But I am not very familiar with it.

My first question is what is the Ethernal Network? On the internet it is
translated as La fête permanente ??? (the permanent party?).

I have difficulties understanding what you mean by a network as artwork. I
imagine projects like DIWO done by Furtherfield, their mailinglist
netbehaviour, global communities like the ones around Upstage, Waterwheel
or videovortex, to name but a few, might apply for this "title". Also
probably some of my own activities like the Angry women and Huis Clos / No
Exit projects and my involvement with the Cyposium touch on this...

I am also not sure I understand what a network-as-artwork is, and I ask
myself (and you) what is interesting about considering networks as
artworks?

I feel kind of uncomfortable with the idea that networks can be curated. I
am not sure that is the right word to use, I think I would rather like to
use the word care taking (I think Clive suggested that in his first mail),
but there might be a much better word.
Curating is a word anchored in the existing landscape of thinking and
activating art as a commodity. As soon as we enter the global networks and
want to think about these as possible artworks we can no longer use "old"
terminologies if we want to understand what is happening.
You can not understand communication using the internet by known standard
and analytical tools. When I need to explain this in a simple way, I do
that by showing, talking about, and acting out my piece A Big Kiss (online
kissing is drawing with a tongue, exciting too, as all drawing can be
exciting, but if you could look at me doing it, you would just see some
strange, foolish gesticulations in the void)

I am interested in collaborative groupdynamics using internet technologies.
I have no other goal with this than to understand and to experiment these.
I am not sure as Randall seemed to be that these practices will lead
automatically to less hierachical, more peer-to peer based relations. It
depends on intentions, of the users, of the proprieties of the interface
used and on how it is controlled, but maybe I am missing something and I
would be glad if someone pointed that out to me.

Maybe, maybe describing some facets of one of my projects might triggers
others to write about other concrete, maybe more appropriate examples.

Angry Women started in 2011. ** It is an artistic research project on
remote communication and collaboration using anger as a pretext, and, in
the beginning it was also a project on female anger using webcam
performances as a facilitator.
So far, besides a lot of email exchange, we had 5 performances with only
ladies, one with only men, two mixed gender performances, but also several
technical test and 2 online evaluation sessions. You can find videos,
texts, performance protocols, analyses and written reaction on
http://www.bram.org/angry/women . 48 People from different professional and
cultural backgrounds (13 different mother tongues), participated, some only
once others up to 6 times.
We are all very much interested in finding out how to communicate in a
situation were we have technological advanced equipment, that makes it
possible to be together in a shared environment while staying on our own,
alone at home; we want to research our contemporary status quo of lonely
togetherness.
This is related to exploring how a sense of "we" can exist in a group of
very different individuals, what it means to think a " to be with" based on
singularities. I hope to find a radical, plastic? new interpretation of
"we".

In our latest evaluation session we discussed the status of the project.
For the moment it is my project It needs a lot of caring, and for the needs
of each participating individual, and for the overall context, for the
"network?". So, I am the who drives this network, it needs my attention,
more attention than creativity, I guess, and it wouldn't exist if I had
been a party animal. But during the online meetings and the performances,
the creation is continuos, the party goes on and the relations between us
have an ethernal feeling (Filliou would probably like to participate) -
only during - afterwards you feel as going home alone under a starry night
ready for another periode of caring.


Yours
Annie Abrahams