[spectre] Thursday club, Goldsmiths, 11th June, Annie Abrahams and Ajaykumar with Ruth Catlow

[alex]

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 THE THURSDAY CLUB
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Date: Thursday 11th June 2009
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


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
participatory 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.