Conference: Dorsal Practices @ SAR

We – Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker – will be presenting a "practice" from our collaborative project, Dorsal Practices, at the forthcoming Society of Artistic Research conference, Too Early/Too Late, in Trondheim, 9-21 April 2023 – see https://sar2023.no/

Abstract: Dorsal Practices

Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open, receptive ethics of relation? A back-oriented approach foregrounds the active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of habits of uprightness + frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming + control. How can this tilt — or inclination — towards a receptive dorsal (dis)orientation enable new modes of thinking, perceiving and being-with; more connected, sustainable ways of living and aliveness?

 

Dorsal Practices is an interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown + writer-artist Emma Cocker, exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. Since January 2021, Brown + Cocker have investigated the felt experience of a dorsal orientation through body-based, somatic-informed movement scores, followed by a process of conversation on ZOOM for reflecting with-and-through their embodied practising, alongside the poetic-philosophical concepts of the dorsal that arise in this working-with and together. Often undertaken back-to-back (subverting frontal habits of online meeting) the conversations foster sensitive interaction, heightening attention to the experience of listening + being listened to, allowing for an emergent “dorsal voicing”. The ‘conversation’ transcripts are reactivated through a shared experimental reading practice, where fresh insights and understanding emerge in the intersubjective and improvisatory interplay of spoken word, through unexpected conjunctions, (re)combinations, the circling and looping of language.

 

For SAR, Brown + Cocker will reactivate their conversational transcripts through sharing/enacting the experimental reading practice as a live event, in the very moment of voicing creating a ‘new’ and contingent unfolding of dorsal sense-making.

 

Details:

See programme here - https://sar2023.no/program3

Friday, April 21, 2023 - 15:30 – 17.00

OLAVSHALLEN: LILLE SAL

 

Event/research: Language-based Artistic Research (SIG)

Language-based Artistic Research 

@ Society of Artistic Research Conference 2023

Trondheim, Norway

Wednesday 19 April 2023

13:00

SIG slot #1 @Cinemateket

Kjøpmannsgata 48, 7011 Trondheim

 

In April 2023, we – Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch and Cordula Daus - will be in Trondheim, Norwary, attending the International Conference of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), 19-21 April 2023 – see https://sar2023.no/

During the conference, we will be introducing the activities of the SAR Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. This in-person session during the SAR conference will share recent activities, introducing the current ‘Practice Sharing’ (2023) alongside announcing future events. During the conference we will also announce the contributors for the second edition of ‘Practice Sharing’. See first edition of Practice Sharing here.

 

The Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) in Language-based Artistic Research was founded and is co-organised by Emma Cocker (UK), Alexander Damianisch (AT), Cordula Daus (DE/AT), and Lena Séraphin (FI). This Special Interest Group was inaugurated in the context of the Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019, within the frame of Convocation, a three-day gathering of expanded language-based practices. Since 2019, this SAR SIG has – through a variety of different formats and forms – connected over 300 artistic researchers interested in language-based practices

Project: Simultaneous Arrivals

During April 2023, I will be in Austria contributing to the research project, Simultaneous Arrivals, which is led by sound and digital artists Hanns Holger Rutz (KUG Graz and GMPU Klagenfurt), installation artist Nayarí Castillo and architectural researcher Franziska Hederer (ISD, TU Graz). Across the project, they are working with invited artists-researchers, including myself as a ‘guest advisor’.

 

About the project: Simultaneous Arrivals is an artistic research project on novel forms of collaborative practices within the FWF framework PEEK (AR 714-G), running from 2022 until 2025. The past decades saw growing entanglement, simultaneity and proximity within a networked world, announcing spatio-temporal changes. Global instabilities demand new practices of sharing responsibilities. Despite a rich history of collaborative practices, artist-researchers still work mostly isolated in their core capacity in the arts and through the arts. Transformative practices such as relaying (Stengers) and a singularly plural conception of being (Nancy) are interrogated as ways-of-doing in artistic research. The project joins artists using spatial practices (installation, sound and new media art) with a perceptual exploration of spatiality, questioning it to look at the background from which one arrives in and orientates within a space (Ahmed). The project posits a novel mode of collaborative artistic process based on simultaneity and spatiality. They act as ‘basic’ or ‘boundary’ concepts that complementarily guide artists working together, preserving diversity and individuality among the group, while binding the process as a whole and bridging boundaries between different practices. The project designs methods that facilitate contact among the concurrent artistic processes and understand how these concepts affect them. What are reference frames that allow to establish a “togetherness, at the same time”, and how do different types of spaces—thought spaces, aesthetic spaces, architectural spaces—and their corresponding modes of spatiality interact and interfere? See https://simularr.net/

Event: Doing Together

Between 3-4 April 2023, I was at Bath Spa University as an invited ‘ethnographer’ or interlocutor to observe the unfolding “doing together” symposium, and initiate conversation as a plenary session.

Issues in Creative Practice: doing together

3rd-4th April 2023

Locksbrook Road Campus, Bath

 

doing together is a two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries and the Art Research Centre (School of Art, Film and Media).
 
This Issues in Creative Practice Symposium will host approximately 20 practical workshops, delivered by staff and PGR students from across the University. Workshops will share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice through doing together. 

doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with others from across the university.  During this two-day event we will test out ways of doing work together, making our practice-based research explicit.