Relations and positions in a connected world.

Location: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, London UK http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/
Time: 6pm - 8pm
Free, all welcome.

With: Annie Abrahams and Ajaykumar
Chair: Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield

[img]http://www.furtherfield.org/pics/p_2873.gif[/img]
Annie Abrahams
The wandering ant II. Relations and positions in a connected world.

My interest is in limits and possibilities of communication. Since 1996 I intervene on the net making interactive webpages and creating articipatory projects that very often have a real life counterpart in a performance or art show.

When in May 2008 I was invited by InternetMonAmour to be on a panel called Survival kit in a p2p world together with a French neurobiologist and the president of the international p2p foundation, I came up with a lecture/performance presentation called The wandering Ant. http://bram.org/info/presentation/IML.htm The wandering ant is the one who refuses to follow the rules of the ant colony and at the same time makes survival of the ant colony possible.

I will continue my reflections around this intriguing metaphor and do a presentation of my recent experiences with web performance as for instance The Big Kiss, a performance that points to changes in behaviour due to machine mediation.

I will pay special attention to Huis Clos / No Exit, a research project in which I will try to answer some questions about our possibilities of being together and collaborating in a networked environment.

We are living in a world where people live more and more in their own bubbles, in their own spheres without need for the other. The post-, alter-modern individual has a dangerous tendency to auto sustain in a world where he communicates in the first place with the virtual others inside himself.

Annie Abrahams is a Dutch artist living in Montpellier, France. She has a doctorate in biology (University of Utrecht) and is a graduate in fine arts (Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten Arnhem). She curates the project InstantS for panoplie.org. She also initiated and curated the Breaking Solitude and Double Bind webperformance projects in 2007 and 2008. Besides doing her art work she lectures and teaches workshops.

http://www.bram.org/
http://aabrahams.wordpress.com/


Ajaykumar
iPak

ajaykumar's presentation discusses the notion of 'relational being' and 'non-anthropocentric being', with particular regard to a current work, iPak, commissioned by Turbulence and evolving over two years from 2008 to 2010. iPak can be engaged with at: http://turbulence.org/Works/iPak/

Ajaykumar’s discusses how we inter-act socially, with the world around us. He examines the potential for generating little worlds - special spaces or places - to contact our playful nature, our imagination, and our feelings about the significance and the sacredness of our lives and our relationships, corresponding in part to what Suzuki calls psychospheres. These relationships are as much to do with our relationship with others, as they are with objects, and with ourselves.

The discussion relates to Nature, about how we may conceive and think about Nature. It re-conceives classical Buddhist and Tantric Art in contemporary form, partcicularly with regard the notion of void. Here it elicits notions of daily life as art; and stimulates particular ecological dynamics of the human being in relation to environment.

http://www.ajaykumar.com/
http://www.shapes-design.com/


http://thethursdayclub.net/

Programmed and Organised by the Goldsmiths Digital Studios.
Supported by the Goldsmiths Graduate School and the Department of
Computing.