Annie Abrahams’s Experiments in Intimacy

This article explores the work of French-based pioneer of networked performance art, Annie Abrahams, in relation to notions of intimacy in mediated performance practice. Specifically, it explores two of Abrahams’s pieces Shared Still Life / Nature Morte Partagée (2010) and L’Un La Poupée de L’Autre (One the Puppet of the Other) (2007). The article suggests that, unlike a plethora of other technologised practices, Abrahams’s works resist the celebration of utopic notions of technologies of connectivity and interactivity. Instead their focus is on the broken links, the miscommunications, in short, the failures of both technological and human connectivity. The article argues that the acceptance of failure as an element that is embedded in the make-up of the networks is what renders Abrahams’s Internet embodied and visceral, “an Internet of emotions.” (Catlow Intimate Collaborations n/p). It further argues in favour of a “banality” that characterises Abrahams’s work –this banality is not the safe zone of intimacy that Johnson has identified, but a far more troubling manifestation of it (n/p). Finally, the article proposes that Abrahams belongs to a generation of female artists who, as Morse has suggested, seek to challenge their very artistic medium (16-33).