OBJECT

besides, is a series of online experiments by Annie Abrahams and Martina Ruhsam, who investigate the performative potential of computer-mediated performance. besides, smaller than a single pixel is a live online-performance specifically conceived for the Pixxelpoint Festival. By listening to each other's gestures (in a visual and acoustic sense), the authors choreograph each other despite being geographically far away from each other: Annie Abrahams in Munich, Martina Ruhsam in Nova Gorica. As an assemblage of text-fragments and daily objects this live-performance is a series of linkages and open relations between words and banal things. The interface frames the encounter of objects and live-speech. This non-improvised real-time composition spiced with a lot of coincidences explores the performativity of objects in an interface usually framing the heads of humans.

ARTIST

Annie Abrahams has a doctoraal (M2) in biology from the University of Utrecht and a MA2 from the Academy of Fine Arts of Arnhem. In her work, using video and performance as well as the internet, she questions the possibilities and limits of communication in general and more specifically investigates its modes under networked conditions. She is known worldwide for her netart and collective writing experiments and is an internationally regarded pioneer of networked performance art. From 2002 till 2005 she taught at the University of Montpellier in the Arts Department. She curated the project InstantS, the Breaking Solitude and Double Bind webperformances series for panoplie.org (2006-2009). In 2012 she co-organised the first Cyposium and published an article on webcam mediated communication and collaboration in JAR #2. In 2013 she started with Emmanuel Guez the ReadingClub project. In 2014 she published two books: from estranger to e-stranger; and CyPosium - the book, co-edited with Helen Varley Jamieson.

— www.bram.org

Martina Ruhsam is working as a choreographer, performer and writer. She studied Movement Studies & Performance in Linz and Theatre-, Film- and Mediastudies in Vienna. From October 2008 to March 2009 she was vicarious head of the theory-centre in Tanzquartier Wien. In 2011 her book Kollaborative Praxis: Choreographie was published by Turia + Kant. Her artistic work and collaborative projects were presented at various venues and festivals in Europe (e.g.: Wiener Festwochen, Tanzquartier Wien, brut, Kino Šiška, Mladi Levi Festival, Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova) – predominantly in Austria and Slovenia. From 2007 until 2014 most of her performances were realised in co-authorship with the Slovene visual artist and director Vlado Gotvan Repnik. She is a member of the editorial board of Maska and has given lectures internationally. Currently she is writing a PhD at the Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen.