“I am not a performer, I use performance to do research.
I am not a researcher, I use research in my performance pieces.
I am a performer who uses research as a medium.
I am a performer researching encounters.”
— 03 2011 Annie Abrahams
Annie Abrahams is a performance artist born in Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands in 1954. She has a doctoral in biology from the University of Utrecht and a masters from the Academy of Fine Arts of Arnhem. Many of Annie Abrahams’ works are through digital media, creating an omnipresence in our internet driven lives. She takes into consideration the issues of bandwidth, distance, separation, and even alienation that occurs online. We can access her work anytime as well as be participants for her collective pieces.
Though a simple daughter to a farmer in Netherlands has grown into an amazing artist who is credited as the first person to hold a Cyposium. A cyposium is an online symposium conducted over the internet using the internet. Her choice of medium tends to be the internet as it is a place for her to ““study human behaviour without interfering in it.” Annie Abraham likes to ion focus her work on society (specifically the online society), the people in the society as well as they way the people interact within the society. Human’s interactions with the third space has become customary in this generation and sometimes we interact better through the third space than any other.
“I want to know how they function, not by them telling me, but by me almost forcing them to reveal an instance of their ‘hidden code’ in public. I want us to go beyond self-representation and the control that this requires.”
— Annie Abraham from the Please Smile on your Neighbour in the Morning Website
Using the online collaborative platform, Annie Abrahams incorporates the Cyposium with her own ideas in Angry Women. Angry Women is an online collaborative work consisting of different versions but with an overarching theme– anger. One commonality in all these different versions is the anger, the anger each of the different women contain regardless of nationality and physical appearance. Annie Abraham asked participants to come online from the safety of their house to talk about what was irritating them or even angering them that day, sometimes in their native tongue or sometimes in English.
“negotiate ideas together in order to achieve a result that’s not just one person’s problem, one person’s effort, but it’s the effort of a group of people solving a problem collectively.”
–Disentangling the Entanglements from the Art of the Networked Practice
Annie Abrahams new symposium is titled “Online En-semble – Entanglement Training”, which will once again be held over the internet. This symposium serves to be a platform where her collaborative peers can come together to negotiate ideas with one another to find a solution. In this symposium, Annie Abrahams embraces the glitches and errors that occur during live internet calls rather than trying to gloss over them. Not just stopping at embracing, Annie Abrahams uses these “network entanglements” to help her further understand human interaction and behaviors. Her creativity has no bounds as she finds creative solutions to “fix” these entanglements; for example, when one camera started to glitch, Annie Abrahams encouraged the remaining participants to intentionally turn on and off their camera. Annie Abrahams quick thinking and creativity created a beautifully raw image on the screens of each of the participants.
“disentangling the entanglements”