An angry woman is vindictive beyond measure, and hesitates at nothing in her bitterness. -Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

This quote seems relevant to the work we analyse this week. Annie Abrabrams’s Angry Woman (2013) is a work done over the third space, where she invited 22 other women of different nationalities to be on an online platform where they all vented their anger, demonstrating it in different forms such as yelling, speaking throughout, or staying silent. They spoke in different tongues, which makes the work that much more interesting because the viewers don’t necessarily understand the language, yet are still able to comprehend the level of anger they experience. In other words, the emotions transcended the language barrier. We see it through their tone, their facial expressions and their body language.

So, how did Angry Women use the medium to its advantage?

So instead of dwelling on the frustrations of the network connection, she finds inspiration, and perhaps more importantly, she sets up compelling situations that allow her and others to make critical observations about connection and disconnection. –Randall Packer

This work is done online, through an social broadcasting site like Adobe Connect. Through Angry Woman, we see Annie Abrahams still moving through the work, even as some of the participants get frozen up because of the bad connection. It somehow works to her advantage, as the faces get frozen when the participants are looking particularly frustrated. According to the article by Randall Packer, she asked the participants to purposefully switch their webcams off, which created a ever changing collage of videos happening simultaneously, and makes the composition of the collage continually changing. Without the medium of a online application like Adobe Connect, this kind of work wouldn’t have been possible. Annie Abrahams uses the glitching network as part of the work, and it adds to the work rather than distracts from the work. She manages to show the community of angry women and weaves them into a cohesive narrative to show the process of the women getting worked up and cooling off (in Take 4 I think). In a way, the women’s energies bounce off each other and they react to each other’s actions, making the work out of the artist’s control, and that’s whats interesting in Angry Woman.