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Visit People's Park Plinth

BramTV

27/08/2005
joachim

Title : bram.org “mise a nu”

http://www.bram.org/bramtv

Possibilities and constraints of the Internet have always inspired artists to create new ways of experimenting. Annie Abrahams has decided to create an alternative way of surfing through the raw material that bram.org offers.

“Sometimes I might be a bit slow, but keep cool, I am a leisure device.”

Annie Abrahams’s latest work focuses on collection, collage and URL redistribution, with an intention of maintaining art, in a state of objective absence, Bramtv takes us on a trip to “data dandyism”.

Tactic of “differed revelation”

Bramtv works as a perception generator using Javascript and PHP written by Clement Charmet, which constantly gives us snapshots of all the works bram.org has to offer. So just sit back and observe, the “mix.php” file takes care of the rest.

Visitors can now experience bram.org “live” with no interference from any gallery or curator, as random works are picked and mixed, presented for you within your browser. Hypertext navigation is still possible and a new non linear work emerges with it’s own breakpoint, along with its new and various entries offering several ways out. Each approach is not necessarily the same for all visitors and every time a visitor experiments on this ‘collection-able’ work, it can offer multiple existences, according to the continuity of the user’s clicks.

Whilst surfing through Annie Abrahams’s website and using Bramtv you are confronted with various contributions left by other visitors who have been before or who have just been passing by. Most of these people are avatars and do not seem to be real. In fact, the user, visitor or participant can make them up or generate their responses. Out of this interaction the contributions by visitors become the meaning of the art work, declaring that behaviour here is part of the aesthetic essence of the work. Bramtv, also makes up a new fiction and narrative of bram.org and redistributes it to be collected on other web servers.

Contagion of fiction in reality / cut and paste

The many works built by Bramtv have different existences that emerge according to the decisions that the users make during their visits. The Internet here is used as a multi-mass universe, of simulations and proposals, where a person can rebuild and re-invent one’s self or selves, without having to deal with the usual risk of come back or the niggling drudge of reality. Bramtv’s snapshot of the website are accessible via the collection button, but the collection pages change each time and when somebody prints a page of the collection it is a 99% bet of certainty that they will have a ‘”single portrait” of bram.org.

In Bramtv as in most of Annie Abraham’s works, both the URL and hosting sever is very much an integral part of the content in the ongoing projects. For example ‘I am an artwork’ is hosted on the frac languedoc roussillon’s website, an official art institute, that has a large contemporary art collection, ‘I am not’ ‘served by’ a splash page for Rhizome, Annie seems to always use every glimpse of information that there is to gather to put up new ways of displaying/retreating information, name dropping?

“I am (not) an artwork”, led to a text written by Bertrand Gauguet, which is constantly rebuilt and the original text ended by these words :

BECAUSE my bookmarks reveal other outlines of my identity,
BECAUSE on the net, I is an other person (inaccessible),
BECAUSE on the net, I is everyone (accessible-no-no),
BECAUSE I is also a random snapshot of the collective identity,
BECAUSE I is ANONYMOUS POETRY !

In the end there will only be a white page, that will not be a snapshot of random collective identity but just a hidden text.

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