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Visit People's Park Plinth

Confrontation [2003]

16/11/2003
Furtherfield

‘Confrontation’ is a collage of 3 elements, variously constructed and channelled by Annie Abrahams/Clement Charmet. They have worked with PHP (the source code is available on request) and Flash, to pull in images from the web, to allow viewers to interject their texts, and to stream an audio recording to the theatre of the webpage.

This work is a cycling, multilingual, taxonomy of human intention at war. Visual and textual language, harvested from the web and input by visitors to the site are fodder for an algorithm which intertwines corporate, promotional and news content with the interior world of the viewer/contributor.
The piece displays web-searched “war” images, (searched in 6 languages) and feeds those images to the page. In front of these are streaming texts, elicited from visitors and meshed with others from “project hope”, an earlier work made in collaboration with Reiner Strasser and Alan Sondheim.

I typed in my own truly earnest response and watched with discomfort as its intended meaning was mutated by association with the texts and images that surrounded it.

CONSECUTIVE TEXTS
“i hope in death there will be no pain
i hope on a rope
i hope a big smack
i do not hope anymore, it is over
i hope that the Prince of Darkness doesn’t exist”

CONSECUTIVE IMAGES
Osama bin Laden
Chewbacca
Sadam Hussein in khakis, caught in a moment of unselfconscious contemplation.

AUDIO
Spoken in short alternating phrases by the wistful, crackled voice of a woman and the deeper, more certain voice of a young man, both in a language that I don’t recognise. At first I assume that they are a grandmother and a grandson- something in the way that they are not listening or responding to each other, just gently, tolerantly speaking in turn. Although the tone suggests emotional engagement it turns out that they are speaking in made up languages.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -Confrontation, resonates with an element of another recent networked event/art piece called “where r u?” by Here nor There, in which visitors were invited to send via the internet or sms, their answers to the questions:-
“where r u?”
“where would u like 2 b?”
Contributions were cycled randomly within a web page as well as being attached to helium balloons and released to the skies.

‘where r u’ invites a clarification and invocation of one’s dreams. Through a similar application of the technology, Abrahams and Charmet address the subject of conflict in the global community. With a baffling array of associations a new rhetorical form for a collective voice is suggested: a faltering beginners script for the language of the multitude.

confrontation– Abrahams/Charmet
project hope – Reiner Strasser, Annie Abrahams, Alan Sondheim
where r u?- Here nor There (an international artists collective)

November 2003