#telematic embrace
Distant Feeling(s) #7 | December 7th, 6PM GMT+1
Distant Feeling(s) 7th, activated on December 7th, 2019, was the third annual activation of the Distant Feeling(s) project, inviting all interested to participate in a shared moment of togetherness across a distance.
Using the internet’s potential of connectivity as a means to reflect on the constraints and limitations of that precise quality, DF has become (since its first iteration in 2015*) a participatory event in which through silence and provoking an inwards movement by the closing of the eyes while connected, which aims to highlight the relational aspect that is (supposedly) intrinsic to the idea of network. Throughout its various activations, from a closed environment between the artists Annie Abrahams, Lisa Parra and Daniel Pinheiro – where the main focus was to attempt sensing the existence and presence of the others while being physically distant, without speaking and with eyes closed – to it becoming a practice shared with an audience, and transforming into an open event since 2017, the project has addressed, cumulatively, the characteristics of the medium/infrastructure to reflect upon them, producing an archive of documentation of the various moments where each one and all work as a visual metaphor of the condition(ing) of connectivity as it is installed in our lives.
A silent, yet sentient, relational encounter, materialized as a telematic embrace where nothing seems to happen and where the lack of apparent action has transformed into the transposition of the concept of agency and a potential way for fighting alienation.
In the more recent activations of the project, a common fact has been the awareness of how machines and the surrounding environments from the different remote locations become present* while the bodies perform a sort of absentia while electricity powers this moment of communion. Where and how are we (always) while the network is functioning?
As it continues to develop, iteration after iteration, whether it is through the annual re-activations or in specific contexts it becomes clear that it is a form of researching togetherness through the internet as a way to counter its fallacy, the promise of a interconnected world where concepts of time and physical space dissipate** (an ubiquitous spatio-temporal unity), which in fact drives today the (im)possibility of collective strength/power. It is a provocation to the role of networked conversations as a practice for activism emptied from specific purpose, again, assuming the role of symbolizing a situation of engaging in different possibilities of triggering collective agency.
Can we find novelty in an already established system, and act from within, towards (an)other purpose(s)?
Distant Feeling(s) highlights in its genesis and continuity the need to feel/sense presence and suggests a pragmatical approach for reshaping a consciousness on kinship resorting to available technological tools which have been transforming its meaning.
“Silence is hard to find…” Camille Renarhd mentions at the end of DF#7 and it is through this quest for silence where machines, responsible for allowing the connection across a distance, “speak” louder and the contemporary restlessness is confronted in this model of interaction between humans and machines. It is not a proposition for a revolution nor a resolution for an evident relational crisis, it is an experience on connectivity and its fundamentals.
The relational revolution is already far along.
At the same time, it is clearly in crisis. – Time Reborn p. xxix
Distant Feeling(s) is a project initiated by Annie Abrahams, Lisa Parra and Daniel Pinheiro
Participants of Distant Feeling(s) #7: Camille Renarhd, Daniel Pinheiro, Muriel Piqué, Annie Abrahams, Bérénice Belpaire, Nicolaas Schmidt, Christine Develotte, Sandra Sarala, Alan Sondheim, Paul Hughes, Nerina Cocchi, Frans Van Lent, Ariane Cassimiro, Frédérique Santune, Camille Bloomfield, Jonathan Chomko, Csenge Kolozsvári, Sabrina Kwong, Ienke Kastelein, Molly Hankwitz, David Cox
Performing Absence… to master the medium?!
Merci pour cela Annie, pour ce miroir que tu nous tends vers nous-même, en plus de nous ouvrir des fenêtres et des portes vers les autres. - Agathe Herry (online participant of Distant Feeling(s) #6) - more reactions here
In Distant Feeling(s) #6 once again a space was activated - a space which opens from different locations into an online communicative interface where the participants rest for 15 minutes with eyes closed aware of their individual presence aligned (in time) with others.
This iteration of Distant Feeling(s) is mounted with the recording of a remix of comments - a text containing the key elements which previous participants made note of after entering this space.
As a moment of suspension the project takes the form of a possible meditative process on our situation while being constantly overflowed with electronic acceleration; in this specific case it was performed to a live audience in Malta as part of Video Vortex #12 on September 26 (2019), the event itself being one concerned with the aesthetics and politics of online video.
A telematic embrace where nothing seems to happen and where the lack of action is precisely its potential as an agency tool towards fighting alienation and perform a possible form of absentia within the network, while the network is in function. So highlighting presence and togetherness as main aspects of social interaction only possible when refraining the imposed ubiquitous spatio-temporal unity that is imposed by technology.
Distant Feeling(s) is a project by Annie Abrahams ( @e-stranger), Lisa Parra ( @lisaparra) and Daniel Pinheiro ( @daniel-pinheiro)
How does it feel to share an interface with eyes closed and no talking?
I felt light, as if I were in a field of light, changing, living light, not with human beings, and probably because that frightened me I tried to visualize you both, to imagine, how, where you were, I tried to make something I could understand of what I felt. As if you were familiar to me - I never met you, but still, apparently you became reassuring, close. (…) Dissolved I felt. Maybe even empty. Certainly destabilized. – Annie Abrahams @e-stranger
This is where I feel that this is not about being mindful, or meditating and rather about sensing and embodying and being present. And in this state of being present we may feel connected to others or we may not– if we are not, then what happens in that isolation? – Lisa Parra @parralis
The “silence” gave space to the sounds of animals, objects and machines. Close to the end I felt that had actually entered the space that us three were sharing together with others. (…) By closing our eyes we’re stripped to just ‘being’, following the rules of not speaking and not looking we are left in a place of communitary lonesomeness that continues to define our everyday world of infinite information and surveillance. – Daniel Pinheiro @daniel-pinheiro
Distant Feeling(s) #3 is part of the encounters between Annie Abrahams, Lisa Parra and Daniel Pinheiro. The 15minutes experiment took place online and was exhibited as part of Visions in the Nunnery. Participants were invited to join either at The Nunnery gallery (London) or remotely using the conference meeting software zoom.us.
As the world grows into a larger networked system, allowing ourselves to share a moment of intimacy with strangers is becoming less probable as we find ourselves immersed in a culture where the sense of time is shifting towards an invisible fastness. It was about acknowledging that system, that fabric, the technological nervous system that became present through the silence of those participating.
Being in space means to establish diverse relationships with the things that surround our bodies. - Deleuze
As distributed digital entities we become part of an intertwined body that is whole by combining different parts of our extended selves. Telematic culture means, in short, that we do not think, see, or feel in isolation (Roy Ascott) and therefore this electronic communion is built out of the relationships that are established when we are ‘together’ and this ‘togetherness’ comes out of a suspension of disbelief*, that in this digital sphere can be the capacity extending proprioception itself – the way that we recognize and position ourselves within this context.
