Free video download of L’un la poupée de L’autre / One the puppet of the other (26 min. French spoken, subtitles in English) until February 15, 2008 - Video composed of the webcam streams captured during the performance of Annie Abrahams and Nicolas Frespech on May 26, 2007 during the Webflash Festival in Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

On the scene two igloo tents. Two spaces in the shape of a sphere shelter two artists who devote themselves to a play in which they are the others living doll. Inside their tents they are face to face via a system of two webcams. The public is able to follow the hidden face to face via an interface, developed by Clément Charmet, that permits to project the webcam images of the two artists side by side on the wall behind the tents.

As in a virtual world (a video game, Second Life) the artists give orders to their avatar played by the other. But contrary to what happens in the virtual world, here the alter ego is well alive. It has its own capacities and it can agree or not to give flesh to the projections of the other.

“The soft hazy pastels of the webcam images created an impression of otherworldliness, where the walls of the tents evoked two floating worlds, miles apart, occupied by two solitary humans preoccupied with opportunities for intimacy. In this enthralling half hour performance, I forgot about the accretion of skills, tools and protocols, necessary to enable the performance, so that all that remained for my conscious consideration was a contingent and vulnerable human interaction expressed through request, action, request, action. I found this work poignant and moving.

L’un la poupée de L’autre is a performed installation that straddles two kinds of public space, physical and virtual, in an exact and specific way to set the scene for an unscripted but closed (non-participative) interaction. Perhaps we could consider it scripted (in the sense that computer code is script) in that it deploys a simple rule set - but it doesn’t have a preset narrative or dialogue.” - Ruth Catlow, intimate collaboration, 9-12-2007.

Download the video on http://lenougat.free.fr/ Username: fan Pass : puppet.

Contact Annie Abrahams a(at)bram.org if you want to show the video, present the installation or performance.