Double Bind presents Removal by Robin Nicolas :: January 12, 2009; 8:30 pm GMT+1 (Paris time) in the virtual salon of panoplie.org. Open to all. (You must obtain a password to participate in the chat.)

Removal, deletion, suppression, cleaning, disappearance, withdrawal, ablation, expulsion, transfer, liquidation, remotion, clearance, elimination, eradication, purge, riddance, dismissal - The deconstruction of space in response to the release of voice.

Nicolas Robin does not look at the Internet; he thoroughly breaks it up by observation. This artist experiments the net with the attitude of a person who learns a foreign language. However, time going by, he tries to invent a new grammar, a suitable syntax that should exceed the insipidness, the noise of the chatter and the visual exchanges. Between the archaeologist and the surgeon, he opens, cuts, sizes, scrapes the surface of the data-flows to detect its basic life matter, its obsessions, and he tries to connect one after the other the elements often scattered, in decompositions and heterogeneous entities.

This performance can be seen as a kind of invitation to build step by step, prudently his language. It can also be analysed as an attempt to stitch together the one (the presence of the invited woman) and the other (an image collected during his former navigations) in the moment of the connection. There was, there is, and this performance will undoubtedly give its place to a “there will be.” (Cyril Thomas, 1-2009)

Nicolas Robin is an artist, an assembler, who lives in Brussels and elsewhere. His works are anchored in a research on intimacy and communication altered by the use of Internet. At the border of absence and presence he explores in data-flows and surfaces even the most negligible contradictions.

About Double Bind: Double Bind. What can this term, invented a little more than 50 years ago to give other than a purely physiological basis to schizophrenia, still mean to us today? What can it make comprehensible? We all know that a double bind situation is invalidating. Is our relation to the computer and internet double bind, bound, bond? I am your friend but you will never know me? Remote presence, ubiquity, multiple personality, absence of the body? Does this make us schizophrenic? How do we adapt?

In response to these questions Annie Abrahams invited 7 artists to conceive a performance for the virtual salon of panoplie.org, equipped for this occasion with two webcams images. The performances will take place every two weeks on Monday evening at 8:30 pm GMT+1 (local Paris time).

Double Bind is the follow-up of Breaking Solitude, a series of 14 web performances between November 2006 and February 2008 meant to experiment “the art to experiment new ways of being together”. Some features, such as time limits (between 5 and 20 minutes) and the refusal to pod cast the performances, relate these events to traditional contemporary art performances. Others, like the participation of the public using a chat window, make them into a new experience for both the artist and the public. The performing artist is confronted to the brute and often emotional reactions of his public, which are not always as respectful as in art centres, museums and galleries. The participating audience has the privilege to assist in a performance, to see and hear a person during an act of creation without having to subject to the social rites of the art world. The only thing, besides some screen-prints that will remain in the archives of panoplie.org after the performance, is the immediate feedback; the text written by the audience.