On Love Performance by Annie Abrahams in Cardiff, Denise Hardman UK, Ben Robinson UK, Tony Chapman UK, Derek Piotr USA, Hedva Eltanani UK, Martina Ruhsam SI, Antye Greie FI, Ienke Kastelein NL and Pascale Barret BE.
From their home, in front of their webcams, 9 English speaking performers communicate on love. The performers are united in an interface, a webcam grid visible on their screens and projected as one single video in front of the public. This way they are together responsible for a shared sound and image space and will be challenged to discover the “we” in a universe of lonely togetherness, to discover what it means to think a ” to be with” based on singularities.
After five performances with only women, one with only men and two mixed fe-male in the ANGRY * series, we had in January 2013 two private webcam meetings (one in French, one in English) where we tried to analyze what was happening and what these performances did with us. One of the things we discussed was if and how the subject of Anger did influence the groupdynamics.
So for this performance in the frame of the Remote Encounters conference in Cardiff I choose to change the subject.
On Love
11 04 2013 8.00 pm
CB4 (the theatre), ATRiuM,
Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries,
University of Glamorgan, Adam Street, Cardiff, Wales, CF24 2FN.
You can watch the performance online from huisclos.mosaika.tv
Invited as lead performance by Garrett Lynch for the conference Remote Encounters - Connecting bodies, collapsing spaces and temporal ubiquity in networked performance.
This video shows some of the dynamics and a part of the Question and Answers we had afterwards live with the public. Are you all alone in front of your computer? Do you miss the public? Are you not also your own audience? Is this the first time you talk about love together? ... And Yes the subject makes a difference, much more pleasant ... (4.47 min in the video)
Technical difficulties - changing performers at the last minute - not having the same streams all (Annie saw Martina moving, in the recording she freezes) - three (four, if we count Denise with very bad low sound in) performers with no sound at all were a big handicap. So we ended up illustrating the difficulties of remote communication more than experimenting new ways of being alone together.
* the Angry Women research series started in 2011. It is a project on remote communication and collaboration using anger as a pretext but can also be described as a project on female anger using webcam performances as a facilitator.
An artistic research project:
*on remote communication and collaboration using love as a pretext
*on love using webcam performances as a facilitator
Annie Abrahams bram.org
Antye Greie aka AGF poemproducer.com
Hedva Eltanani vs4rslab.wordpress.com
Ienke Kastelein ienkekastelein.nl
Martina Ruhsam turia.at/titel/ruhsam.html
Denise Hardman
Ben Robinson gpartworks.blogspot.co.uk
Tony Chapman
Derek Piotr derekpiotr.com
Pascale Barret pascalebarret.com
This group is constituted of artists I met sometime, somewhere via the internet and whose work is related to computer, performance, writing and or contemporay art practice.
Développement interface Ivan Chabanaud mosaika.tv – Kawenga scène(s) numérique(s).
Contact : Annie Abrahams
Article "Meaningful connections: exploring the uses of telematic technology in performance" comparing On Love to "make-shift" by Helen Varley Jamieson and Paula Crutchlow, Elena Perez in Liminalities issue 10.1. Edited by Garrett Lynch (University of South Wales) and Rea Dennis (Deakin University). Mai 2014.
If you want to know more about the backgrounds of this performance work, please read : 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 has been published in the Journal for Artistic Research, an online, peer-reviewed journal for the publication and discussion of artistic research.
related Proje(c)t voisin :Angry Women
