don't touch me / ne me touchez pas - a work about intimacy and attitudes in front of the computerscreen

by Annie Abrahams

I want to tell you a story. Touching the image of the sleeping woman will interrupt the story. The woman will change position, and starts telling the same story again. After being touched 5 times she will dissappear.

Males might think the story is about 'desire', females will tell you it's about the painfull change from adolescence to being adult.

The work don't touch me was made for the site being human

being human is made for an individual user, who looks at the work in his own context. It tries to provoke sentiments and reflections around the possibilities and limitations of communication on the net.

In don't touch me the user is obliged to inactivity, if he wants to capture the essence of the work. This inactivity is against everything a computer user is adapted to. The message at the end of the story (never look out of the window, that will protect you) might induce a reflection about the "dangers" of communication outside of the computer screen.

Technical assistance for don't touch me was provided by Clement Charmet.

The Press about don't touch me:

"The Web project, thus, brings to the fore the desire to communicate - it's possibilities and limitations. It focuses a perspicacious gaze on something that concerns us all, this fundamentally human desire to bond." (Sylvie Parent about "being human", 09-1999, MCIAC )

" To speak the internet language ", is like engaging in a behaviour governed by rules and being bound by these rules. It is also, in a literal sense, to move around. Just like meaning is moving all the time. These are the proposals inherent in "being human" : recording, asking questions, commanding, promising. Offers neither true nor false, because they can be successful or fail. (Louis-José Lestocart in "Langage(s) du Net", 01-2001, Archée, translation AA)

Annie Abrahams is an artist working on the net since 1997. Her most important work: being human questions issues of communication and identity on the internet and has been presented at numerous multimedia festival. Before graduating as a painter at the 'Academy of Arts' in Arnhem, Annie Abrahams obtained a PhD in biology at the University of Utrecht. She is actually teaching at the university of Montpellier in the arts department.

Annie Abrahams is Dutch and lives in the south of France.