Writing/Text: Experiments along the brink of I

This text (below) has been written in response to encountering and participating in a series of action-research projects developed by Sara Wookey and Bianca Scliar Mancini including Movement in the City (Toronto, 2010) and Unfolding Zagreb (2009). It extends lines of enquiry from my other prose texts Room for Manoeuvre; or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins (published in The Manual for Marginal Places, closeandremote, 2010); The Yes of the No! (produced as part of The Summer of Dissent, Bristol, 2009); and Pay Attention to the Footnotes (in collaboration with Open City 2007- 2010).

Book launch II: Apeirophobia

Apeirophobia – Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry

Book Launch at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, Wednesday 21 March, at 19.00


I will be contributing to a discussion event at Danielle Arnaud Gallery as part of the book launch for Apeirophobia by Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry.

Apeirophobia by artists Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, designed and co-edited by James Langdon, includes texts by: Emma Cocker / Brian Dillon / Mladen Dolar / Eli Noé. Published by VIVID 2011.

Exhibition: An Exhibition of a Study on Knowledge

An Exhibition of a Study on Knowledge

Opening Event: 13^th April 2012: Lecture Performance 'Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis' with Emma Cocker and Nikolaus Gansterer. Artists: Rossella Biscotti, Marjolijn Dijkman, Nikolaus Gansterer, Toril Johannessen, Pilvi Takala, Haegue Yang, Gernot Wieland

The knowledge society, designed for livelong learning, serves as foundation of the present capitalist order, cognitive capitalism, which foregrounds multiplicity evoked through cognitive work in knowledge economies. Here knowledge is not longer a tool but becomes the actual ‘product’. Such to a large extent interdisciplinary functioning economies involve a broad range of specialists: economists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, geographers, chemists and physicists, as well as cognitivists, psychologists or sociologists. For the knowledge flows they generate, livelong learning, prescient education and communication are increasingly fundamental. Currently, we witness how education stratifies societies and plays an important role in the class struggles in schools and universities. Self-learning methods are becoming increasingly significant as precarious developments in the public education and fields knowledge-production have lead to privatization of knowledge as well as restricted access to education. The exhibition itself as a study brings together a group of international artists in the midst of current changes of the production and position of knowledge. Their artistic practices expand on other domains of critical thinking to bring out scientific, statistical, discursive, empirical, playful or artistic perspectives on knowledge. Aiming at an encapsulation of ephemerality (knowledge), the exhibition will enhance the position of an investigation at large, than a mere display of conceptual objects.

Curated by: Margit Neuhold and Fatos Ustek 

Forum Stadtpark Graz:

Opening: Friday, April 13, 2012. 6:00 pm

Duration: 14. 4. – 12. 5. 2012

Part of the festival: aktuelle Kunst in Graz: 4. – 6. 5. 2012

Reading Group: To Move and Be Moved

@ Site Gallery, Sheffield

Thursday 23 Feb 2012, 6pm onwards

Affective Readings 

In partnership with If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, I am hosting a series of reading group discussions at Site Gallery in Sheffield, for exploring a number of texts relating to the notion of AFFECT. The first reading group is on 23 Feb, with two texts by Brian Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect, available here and Concrete is as Concrete Doesn't available here. There will also be reference to the introduction chapter ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ from The Affect Theory Reader, (ed.) Melissa Greg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke University Press, 2010. Future dates are Thursdays 23 February, 8 March, 22 March, 5 April, 19 April. Texts to be confirmed in due course.


The reading group is linked to the forthcoming exhibition by Jeremiah Day at Site Gallery, entitled 
Of All Possible Things
, 2 March - 7 April 2012. Jeremiah Day is one of five artists commissioned by If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution, to make a new work as part of Edition IV – Affect (2010-2012). In Jeremiah Day’s work questions of site and historical memory are explored through fractured narratives, employing photography, speech, and improvisational movement.

Writing: The Affective City

Image: from Movement in the City, Toronto, 2010

I am in the process of writing a new text, provisionally entitled 'Experiments Along the Brink of I', as part of a collaboration with artists Sara Wookey and Bianci Scliar Mancini. The writing draws on a sustained period of conversation with these artists, where I have both been witness to and participant in a series of workshops for exploring 'movement in the city' or even a form of 'social or everyday choreography', delivered by them in various international cities including Zagreb and Toronto (both within the context of PSi - Performance Studies International - events). I am envisaging that the text will echo the model of 'essaying' developed as part of my collaboration with Open City and within my pamphlet-manifesto The Yes of the No!. The chapter/sections deal with (as a provisional list) (1) the affective city; (2) body as force (following Spinoza); (3) testing limits (following Arakawa & Gins) ; (4) rehearsal; (5) warming/stirring; (6) fold/unfold (following Jose Gil); (7) speeds and slownesses; (8) collectivity/connectivity; (9) appropriate/appropriate; (10) befitting; (11) immersion & observation. The development of the text undoubtedly draws on my experience of collaboration with Open City (which I have previously interrogated through the prism of a specifically Spinozist/Deleuzian set of ideas in writing such as Performing Stillness). It also connects closely with ideas emerging as part of a text I am also writing on the work of Cezary Bodzianowski (called Squaring up to the Round Hole) and the concerns of the reading group around notions of affect (in collaboration with If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution) that I am hosting shortly at Site Gallery in Sheffield. The full text will be posted shortly, but in the meantime here is a draft excerpt from the beginning sections.

"To conceive of the city in choreographic terms is less the imagining of it as a stage upon which to dance, but rather to apprehend it as a field of forces and intensities, as choreography. It is a weave or web of flows and rhythms, the live entanglement of relations between bodies and space. Attending to this choreography requires looking beyond what is habitually seen, becoming attuned to the permissions and conditions that determine the very nature of its interactions. Less concerned with the visual spectacle of how the city might appear as a dance of interlocking flows, focus must delve deeper, for invisible forces set the pace and pattern of interrelations with(in) a particular context. More than mapping the traces of movements scored – the notation of existing trajectories across and through a given space or situation – the choreography of the city must be registered in another key. Visible rhythms are merely watched from the stands, where what can be witnessed are only the effects of unknown forces, and not the forces themselves. To comprehend the true nature of a force requires that it is encountered and not just observed. This enquiry cannot be practiced at a distance or through mind alone. Beyond regarding how the rhythm of the city looks, the corporeal body registers how it feels, by experiencing it close up, in the flesh. Affect is measured through the pulse of the body, according to how a body moves and is moved. The body is a force among other forces, its course determined by its capacity to affect and be affected by other things. Choreography attends to these interdependencies, conceptualizing the city as the temporal unfolding of fluid and ever-changing relations.

Movement through any space is shaped as the desires of the individual body meet with the pressures of its surrounds; performed through the negotiation of different forces as the helmsman steers against the pressure of the water and the wind. At times, it seems that we have lost our grasp of helmsman’s knowledge, our capacity to harness the momentum of forces that are outside of our control. Sometimes perhaps, we give in too soon, surrendering too quick and easily to the force of the situation in which we find ourselves. Too often, our bodies seem at the mercy of powers that cannot fully be discerned, our movements conform to the call of unspoken laws and a logic that we seem unable to resist. Here, the body is experienced only through the pressures acting upon it, seemingly unable to recognize its own internal force or agency, its capacity to withstand or tolerate as much as yield. Certain spaces push towards specific kinds of performance, direct the body to behave in a fixed or scripted way. The possibilities of what a body could do shrink to fit the template of expectation; options narrow to the standards of a pre-set score, where the individual body can express itself only through the slightest embellishment of the norm. Over time, our navigation of a space congeals towards a set pattern of routinized gestures, as day-after-day we dutifully repeat and repeat our chosen groove, rarely missing a beat. Pattern sediments towards protocol, an unspoken rulebook that tacitly moderates the limits of what is allowed. It is tempting to imagine that rules are drawn from elsewhere, laws cooked-up by faceless government hooked on curbing the enthusiasm of our wayward desires. And yet we author and enforce the limitations that determine how we live our lives; our complicity and obedience maintains their authority, strengthens their hold. Then, to be more discerning, for any rule is only good as long as it protects and affirms life, failing if it only curtails and constrains.

Take heed then, for it is through our bodies that we might differentiate the rule of friend from foe. The body is an instrument capable of attending to and measuring the nature of both its own force, and the affect of other forces. Yet this skill must be practiced daily, without which it becomes lost or lapsed. On occasion, individual bodies might need to be re-attuned, else risk forgetting the art of affection. At times, we too readily forfeit or forgo our agency as affective beings, as forces amongst forces. We create rules that diminish our potential for interaction, that keep us atomized and at a distance from other bodies, removed from those we don’t yet know. We fiercely police the boundaries of our own personal space; keep our eyes dutifully diverted lest we catch another’s glance, attract their attention. We keep ourselves to ourselves; mind our own business, look the other way. We purposefully name the other stranger; in turn, we too feel increasingly estranged. Our bodies have become unreliable; too sensitized to a sense of risk and danger, too dull or numbed to act another way. We are losing the feeling of what the body – our very being – is capable. Diminishing awareness is self-imposed, too readily accepted, for the limits of self and situation are rarely tested. So often, our own capacity remains unchartered; moreover, the limits of what we are capable have become mistaken for what is allowed. The body folds to fit the mold of how it thinks it should behave. Limbs forget the fullness of their reach; skin barely remembers the feel of unsolicited touch. Voice lowers appearing indiscernible amongst other voices; the body’s movements synchronize to the metronomic regulation of those that were there before us, there before us, there before us. Without practice, the body’s capacity to electively act is decreased. Yet, the body can also be re-trained, recalibrated; through exercise it can nurture its own affective force. With practice, the body becomes receptive (and not resistant) to situations that test its limits affirmatively, inoculated against those situations which dampen or diminish its potential or power. Here, to truly care for the self involves challenging its limits – by experimenting along the interstice where the self encounters the world – and not through the withdrawal or retreat safely away from worldly pressures. The resistance of the body is thus not performed by trying to escape or refuse the terms of a repressive or testing situation but rather by rehearsing ways for transforming its affects, for performing the situation differently, otherwise [...]"

Writing: Contradictory Words

I am currently writing a review of the exhibitions by Hanne Darboven and Raphael Hefti at Camden Arts Centre for Frieze magazine. More to follow soon.

Book launch: Apeirophobia

Apeirophobia – Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry

Book Launch at Motto Berlin, Friday February 17th, at 19.00


Presented by the Reading Room

Apeirophobia by artists Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, designed and co-edited by James Langdon, includes texts by: Emma Cocker / Brian Dillon / Mladen Dolar / Eli Noé. Published by VIVID 2011.

Apeirophobia is a new publication by artists Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry exploring the processes of translating an artwork into book format, an extension of a theme in Kihlberg and Henry’s work of things changing form through processes such as memory and recall, documentation and revisiting histories and possible futures.

Publication: I AM NOT A POET: Assembling

I AM NOT A POET: Assembling was assembled and distributed by David Berridge (very small kitchen) at the Totalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh on August 21st 2011, as the conclusion of I AM NOT A POET. Participants in the show - which took place from 7-21st August - were invited to contribute an A4 sheet to a loose leaf b/w assemblage, whatever they wished to appear under the title of I AM NOT A POET.

With contributions from Magdalen Chua, Emma Cocker, Peter Cant & Alex Eisenberg, Jennie Guy, Colin Herd, Mirja Koponen, Shandra Lamaute, Michelle Letowska, Jow Lindsay, nick-e melville, Iain Morrison,  Marit Muenzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, seekers of lice, Gerry Smith, Kim Walker, and Samantha Walton.


My video Close Reading (C.O.P.V., 1950) has also been selected for inclusion in the Winter Issue of ONandOnScreen and can be viewed here. ONandOnScreen is poems + videos. Here videos are linked with poems and poems with videos in a shared space, widening the spectrum and essential strangeness of each. ONandOnScreen is a conversation between moving words and moving images, 
on and on. ONandOnScreen is edited by poet and critic Thomas Devaney .

ONandONScreen’s fifth issue WINTER 2012 is now online. 

Featuring work by Joanna Fuhrman, Jena Osman, Farid Matuk, Cara Baldwin, Wayne Kosetenbaum, Catherine Wagner, David Lehman, Kevin Killian, Matt Hart, Jared Stanley, Gabie Strong, Lytle Shaw, Leonard Gontarek, Adam Fitzgerald, Chris Girard, Mark So. With additional videos by Zoe Strauss, Emma Cocker, Brendan Lorber, and mIEKAL aND.

Video: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis

Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker, Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, video still

Using processes of cross-reading and live drawing, Nikolaus Gansterer & Emma Cocker approach the publication Drawing a Hypothesis as a reader might thumb through the book; where certain sections appear to be lingered over, while others are skimmed in the search for key words and phrases, evocative fragments and extractions. Their reading suggests that books like Drawing a Hypothesis might not always need to be read in a linear or logical way, but rather are to be dipped into, allowing for detours and distractions within the event of diagrammatic reading itself. The lecture takes the figures of thought at the heart of Drawing a Hypothesis as points of departure for exploring and performing the correlations between thinking and drawing. Addressing the shifting and ambivalent properties of image, symbol and drawing within the publication, it asks, “how can these visual artefacts be comprehended?”

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, Nikolaus Gansterer &Emma Cocker,

Documentation of a performance-lecture at M HKA, Antwerp

Video was commissioned and produced by M HKA

Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium

as part of the Graphology Project curated by Edwin Carels

Camera and editing:

Patrick Elliott

With text by A. Adam, Monika Bakke, Kerstin Bartels, Marc Boeckler, P. Brandlmayr, Emma Cocker, Gerhard Dirmoser, B. F. Fisher, Nikolaus Gansterer, Hanneke Grootenboer, Karin Harrasser, Helmut Leder, Katja Mayer, Ralo Mayer, Felix de Mendelssohn, M. L. Nardo, Christian Reder, Philippe Rekacewicz, Moira Roth, Andreas Schinner, Ferdinand Schmatz, section.a, Walter Seidl, Christina Stadlbauer, Axel Stockburger, Jane Tormey

Conversation: Uitwaaien

I have been invited to participate in a dialogue with Alice, Annelies De Smet around our shared research interests in how public space is lived and performed, as part of her PhD at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Brussels. Annelies De Smet is interested in “the experience and mapping of transit in public space … in the transit, obstacles, incidents, small interruptions, anecdotes, goalless-ness [...] ”. She encountered my work as part of her project ‘uitwaaien’. Uitwaaien is a Dutch word that cannot be fully translated into English: it literally means 'to walk in the wind' but in the more figurative and commonly used sense it means to take a brief break in the countryside to clear one's head. Below are some stills from her video mapping ‘instance of tongues’ which is based on previous conversations on ‘uitwaaien’. More to follow.

Alice, Annelies De Smet, 'Instance of Tongues'.

Performance: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis (Part 4)

On 2 February 2012, Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker presented the fourth iteration of their performance lecture Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis at  (NGBK) New Society for Fine Arts, Berlin. Previous iterations of the lecture took place at (Part 1) M HKA, Antwerp; (Part 2) KNAW and (Part 3) Kunsthalle Project Space, Vienna. The performance lecture was in conjunction with a book launch of Drawing a Hypothesis : Figures of Thought (ed. Nikolaus Gansterer, Springer, 2011) and also On the Materiality of Diagrams (Materialität der Diagramme) by Berlin based scholar, Susanne Leeb (see below).

Images: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, documentation from a performance-lecture at NGBK, Berlin, 

Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker. Photography: Simona Koch.

About Materialität der Diagramme. Kunst und Theorie

The promise of diagrams to put via their abstract form an order to thinking is often subverted in the arts. Not only is the rationalism of diagrams directed towards its opposite or obsolescence. Furthermore, the materiality of relations is addressed within seemingly pure abstract connections. This concerns the erotics of the machine in the work of Duchamp or Picabia as well as the thinking of lines of flight in Deleuze and Guattari, the co-emergence of a »severality« in Bracha L. Ettinger, the infrastructure of money flows as an expression of power relations in the work of Bureau d’études. The book presents contributions which underline the ambivalence of diagrams as concrete abstractions throughout modern and contemporary art in a theoretical and artistic perspective.

With contributions by Ricardo Basbaum, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Bureau d’études, Bracha L. Ettinger with Birgit M. Kaiser & Kathrin Thiele, Susanne Leeb, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Amy Sillman. ed. by Susanne Leeb, b_books: Berlin, PoLYpeN series (ed. by Sabeth Buchmann, Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel, Susanne Leeb), Berlin 2012.

Event: What is Artistic Research?

My proposed paper ‘Tactical Research - Practices for Thinking (Oneself) Differently’ has been provisionally accepted as part of the strand of enquiry, ‘What is Artistic Research?’, at the Cumulus conference, School of Art and Design, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland.

Conference Questions:

What is artistic research? What is the role of artworks in it? How is artistic research related to various traditions of combining art and research: a) Research for art, b) Research of art, c) Art for research, d) Art + theory = research? Why are (some) artists trying to combine art and research? What can be gained with it? What are the possible dangers or failures of it? What is it needed for? What is “artistic knowledge” or “art’s own knowledge”? What is included in it, what separates it from so called scientific knowledge? In what sense is art research? How should art and research be combined in the university context?

Abstract

Tactical Research - Practices for Thinking (Oneself) Differently

I propose to approach the (art) research process as an affirmative practice for thinking (oneself) differently, reframing artistic research as a ‘tactic’ or ‘way of operating’ (de Certeau) for producing a critical form of subjectivity, part of a wider process of subjectivization. Purposefully shifting from thinking of research as determined within and by the (narrow) terms of an academic ‘project’ (as defined by the more instrumentalized and commodified conceptualizations of research within academia) I develop an understanding of the research process as a live and lived enquiry, considering it in analogous terms to or as a manifestation of the philosophical project of ‘making life into a work of art’ (Foucault). My intent is to move from viewing research as the teleological pursuit of knowledge, a linear and outcome-driven process catalyzed by the identification of questions to which conclusions are subsequently sought. Instead, I consider research as an expression of ‘conatus’ (Spinoza) or of the ‘enquiring of the enquirer (Badiou) where the search or striving of its endeavor (rather than its outputs or contribution to knowledge) is recuperated critical value. Here, a subject is not what is studied at a distance but rather what is performed or enacted through the research itself.

Talk: Becoming Line

I have been invited to give a lecture at UWE, Bristol for the Department of Drawing and Applied Arts in March. The lecture will draw on a series of texts that I have recently written that explore the speculative and constitutive potential of drawing including ‘Distancing the If and Then’ in Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, (ed.) (Springer, 2011) and ‘The Restless Line, Drawing’ in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (I. B. Tauris, 2012); as well as referring to ongoing research projects/enquiries such as Site (Sight) Lines (2010>) which explores the practice of throwing a glance as a form of performative drawing capable of constituting temporary collectivities or clusters of sociability.