Your mouse is hurt (not an expression but a proposition about pain)

Annie Abrahams, Dutch artist living in france, is the creator of the Being Human website. Being Human plays with the simple fact – that she enounces in the interview by Bertrand Gauguet for Archée  – that is : the words that we think we understand, are not exactly the ones that we think we understand.

Painsong opens with a simple interface, two images (red dots, freckles ?) on both sides of 15 embeded mp3 players. Below this, is a link to a related artwork called pain. When the page loads an autostart trigger plays all the 15 sounds at once, resulting with an incomprehensible chaotic sound mix. The first sound heard is ‘aie’, as if someone was hurt and the last sound is a voice singing “we are all alone with you”. The whole soundwork is composed of sentences, onomatopoeias, and little songs, pronounced in french, english and dutch.

Listening to pain
The visitor is directly confronted with expressions of felt pain (aie !, Âiow !), to text about pain related situations, that seem to be connected to Annie Abraham’s own personal pain, such as ‘dear dad, it seems i have a pain in my back because of you …’ once the page is fully loaded, the visitor is able to play every part of the song again as often as he/she wants, even mix sounds together to create something new, or simply listen to them one by one as if reading a diary.

Generating pain
By replaying the sound we provoke pain (don’t touch me). The visitor is questioned on what it feels like to hurt and be hurt, does this give him/her pleasure or is it producing consolation? The visitor is forced to react to the action of clicking; due to the situation of no longer being able to ignore the meaning of what is being listened to. Is playing with the mouse hurting someone or something. Who is the visitor hurting or what are they hurting? Is Painsong about hurting someone, or hurting a computer?

Creating a new pain
The machine/computer, is a neccesary tool for the execution of this work – like a DJ’s deck. By using this relationship, and mixing the sounds together the visitor creates new sounds of pain, like a nightmare or a sweet dream out of which one cannot escape or run away from without closing the window.

Mechanic pain
With an extreme lucidity of language, through a work that leaves us confused, Annie Abraham creates a relation between Mechanic and organic pain, in Painsong  she writes for us with her songs/sounds, like Antonin Artaud said in respect of writing for the illiterates.

Painsong has been presented at:
Packet Curated by Richard Rinehart, (New Langton Arts, December 2004)
FILE 2004, (Sao Paulo).
Interview with Annie Abrahams for Archée by Bertrand Gauguet http://archee.qc.ca/ar.php?page=imp&no=116