Annie Abrahams and Ajaykumar, Goldsmiths College, London, 11 June 2009, 6-8pm



Thursday Club presents Annie Abrahams and Ajaykumar
Location: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building
Cost: Free of charge, all welcome. No Booking Required
Website: www.thethursdayclub.net

Annie Abrahams is interested in limits and possibilities of communication. Since 1996 she intervenes 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 Abrahams 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, she 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.” Abrahams

Abrahams will continue her reflections around this intriguing metaphor and present her recent experiences with web performance as for instance The Big Kiss, a performance that points to changes in behaviour due to machine mediation. She will pay special attention to Huis Clos / No Exit, a research project in which she 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.” Abrahams

The Big Kiss http://www.bram.org/toucher/TBK.html
Huis Clos / No Exit
http://bram.org/info/projects/huisclos/nu2s.html

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/
Being Human / Etant Humain a big interlinked universe that concentrates on the possibilities and limitations of communication.

http://aabrahams.wordpress.com
blog and news.

Extensive CV
http://bram.org/info/cv_aabrahams_english.pdf

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.

Ajaykumar is artist, academic at Goldsmiths, University of London, designer,
co-director of shapes-design, curator, and member of TrAIN: research centre of University of the Arts London in Transnational Art, Identity and Nation.

His practice and research concerns:
– Being: dynamics of art, architecture, ecology, therapy, other science, technology.
– Dynamics between inter-action and immersion.
– Ludic processes.
– Curatorial processes engendering spectator-artists

See Ajaykumar’s latest internet art work: ‘iPak’ – http://transition.turbulence.org/works/iPak
See Ajaykumar’s latest book work: ‘zero’, a collaboration with Alok b. Nandi – http://www.zero.fluxtopia.net

Further details at:
www.ajaykumar.com
www.shapes-design.com