Book chapter: Liminal Landscapes

I have been invited to develop a book chapter for the forthcoming publication, Liminal Landscapes. The chapter will develop ideas explored in my recent conference paper at the Liminal Landscapes conference at the Liverpool John Moores University. See abstract below.

Exit Strategies – Looking for Loopholes

Referring to the work of artists Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting, this chapter explores how the liminal landscape operates as a critical site or location for questioning the controlling, striated cartographies that habitually map contemporary subjectivity and social identity. For Brandon and Bunting, the inhabitation and interrogation of various indeterminate geographies or border terrains is considered synchronous to the conception of other, less acquiescent, ways of living and performing a life. Within projects such as BorderXing and Status Project, the artists attempt to exploit the indeterminacy of those interstitial spaces particular to the twenty-first century: the liminal landscapes emerging as the border logic of the sovereign state struggles with the borderless ideology of globalization, or else the uncertain and unstable territories located along the threshold between physical and virtual realms. Brandon and Bunting are less concerned with giving shape to these interstitial landscapes as affecting a change of perception in how they might be narrated and navigated differently to expectation. For these artists, the liminal landscape (whether spatial, social, physical or virtual) presents as a space of opportunity within which to extend or even produce further indeterminacy, wherein the rules and restrictions that habitually govern social space (and the lives lived therein) are rendered porous or deemed void. Within their practice, the specific properties of liminality or of a liminal position are tactically adopted in order to construct and inhabit the landscape (or indeed a life) differently to the expectations and permissions perpetuated by the normative structure, for the purposes of producing momentary escape routes and loopholes. Referring to specific projects by Brandon and Bunting, this chapter explores the idea of the loophole as a particular manifestation of and in liminal space; in turn, how the loophole might operate as the inaugural site of a specific species of liminal – unbound or deterritorialized – subjectivity. 


A draft version of the chapter can be read below.

Text Work: Field Proposals (part 1 and part 2)

Below are a set of new 'Field proposals' which I am currently developing for a number of different exhibition contexts including Writing/Exhibition/Publication at The Pigeon Wing, London; The Department of Micropoetics curated by David Berridge and Your Future Needs You at Art Gene, Barrow-in-Furness.  

     

        

Image: Field Proposal (2) for The Pigeon Wing

Field Proposal (2) is proposition for a portable studio, the diagramming of a thinking space. The work exists as a pairing of two proposals. Part 1 uses titles from existing work in an attempt to plot the coordinates of or establish the cartography of a practice, where intersecting lines suggest the potential of as yet unnamed possibilities which for now remain indiscernible. Part 2 is largely blank, in further anticipation of this still to be navigated territory.

Exhibition: Afterlive

I will be presenting a re-working of Re- (a collaborative reading and its documentation) in collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham as part of the forthcoming exhibition, Afterlive , at Norwich Arts Centre:

Afterlive 

Saturday 4th September – Saturday 30th October

Blast Theory, Rachel Lois Clapham & Emma Cocker, Holly Darton, Richard Dedomenici, FrenchMottershead, Dot Howard, Richard Layzell, Open Dialogues, Performance Re-enactment Society, and Townley & Bradby.

Live art, by its very nature, is ephemeral. After it has happened it takes on another life: in audience anecdotes, reviews, films, and photographs. However, a number of artists are actively engaged in this process: they make decisions about the afterlife of their work, and mould the shape of the anecdotes with self-published books, and carefully edited films. Documentation is fallible: it can never fully represent a live work. The artists in this exhibition embrace this separation between primary and secondary forms, this room for manoeuvre; this documentation work doesn’t necessarily favour authenticity and evidence over memory and imagination in the creation of a legacy for a live piece. Alongside the exhibition there will be a launch event  , including a panel discussion and an evening programme of live art.

Curated by Holly Rumble, an Escalator Performing Arts artist, and co-founder of other/other/other.

AFTERLIVE LAUNCH EVENT

Saturday 4th September: Free 1-4pm/£10 4-11pm (16+)

A programme of live art to launch the AFTERLIVE exhibition.

1-4pm OTHER/OTHER/OTHER: Now That’s What We Call Live Art…

Site-specific live work by members of the Norwich-based collective (Free entry)

4.30-5.30pm PANEL DISCUSSION

A discussion about the role of documentation in live art, with: Rachel Lois Clapham, Tom Marshman, and Clare Thornton, chaired by Lois Keidan (Live Art Development Agency).

5.30-7pm EXHIBITION LAUNCH

7-11pm LIVE ART NIGHT

Including:

‘Re-’ Rachel Lois Clapham & Emma CockerRachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker essay the relationship between performance/document, live/recording, writing/written. This collaborative reading presses on two writers – and two writing practices- coming together to explore process, product and performance (of text).

‘A Long Walk’ Esther PilkingtonA performance about the artist’s re-enactment of Richard Long’s ‘Crossing Stones’ (1987): a walk from Aberystwyth to Aldeburgh, using Long’s documentation as an instruction.

‘Approximating the Art of Stuart Sherman’ Robin DeaconThis performance is centred around a series of re-enacted performances based on the works of the late American artist Stuart Sherman (1945 – 2001), a seminal though underexposed figure in the history of performance art. Described as “the Buster Keaton of linguistics”, his performances involved complex manipulations of objects that explored time, place, language and meaning. This piece will explore the conundrum of Sherman’s methodology through Robin Deacon’s transcription and physical re-enactment of the artist’s performances based on the original documentation.

‘Sex Idiot’ Bryony Kimmings (pictured above)Bryony Kimmings is a Sex Idiot. In 2009 Bryony found out she had a common sexual disease, and was faced with the arduous task of re-tracing her sexual footsteps to see where she may have contracted her little problem.

Publication: Open City

Below is a pamphlet bringing together texts/images produced in collaboration with Open City (Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday). If you would like a copy of the pamphlet please email me: emma.cocker@ntu.ac.uk

Text Work: Re-writing a re-reading (catalogue text)

Below are a couple of images from the NTU Fine Art degree show catalogue (2010) to which I was asked to contribute an essay. In lieu of an essay I submitted selected excerpts from Re – a collaborative performance reading by myself with Rachel Lois Clapham. Re – focuses on the tension between the improvised and rehearsed, and on the play between the visible and invisible, or public and private states of not knowing within the performed act of writing. Extracted from their original context, the fragments of writing perhaps also have the capacity to say ‘something’ in relation to the experience of an art practice, and in turn, the experience of being at art school.  

Text: From Ritual to Theatre

From Ritual to Theatre is a film screening programme at ANCIENT & MODERN curated by artist Ben Judd. The curatorial statement for this programme is a partly co-authored text (Cocker/Judd) extending ideas emerging from a series of discussions and pieces of writing produced from a dialogue between myself and Ben, where the notion of ritual and the figure of the initiate became used as starting points to explore our shared concerns.

From Ritual to Theatre

During the month of August, ANCIENT & MODERN presents From Ritual to Theatre curated by Ben Judd, a series of artists’ films that explore the grey area between performance and ritual.

The artists in From Ritual to Theatre reuse the signs, codes and mannerisms of rituals, rites and ceremonies. Through their restaging, these events, both everyday and profound, are used as readymades, re-exploring their value and cultural status. The work in From Ritual to Theatre explores the paradox of the parameters and freedom that self-imposed ritual provides. In relation to the cultural and historical baggage that these ritualistic acts suggest, the artists explore the role of the initiate, a position which has a strangely exempted status. For anthropologist Victor Turner, the initiate occupies an ambiguous territory where they remain “neither here nor there … betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom, convention”. During the liminal or transitional phase of any ritual activity the characteristics and laws of the dominant social structure are momentarily collapsed, as “the ritual subjects pass through a period and area of ambiguity”  where “they are at once no longer classified and not yet classified”. The artists locate themselves at the fulcrum where one position begins to slip into another, the shimmering point where fixed positions begin to waver. Text by Emma Cocker and Ben Judd

Artists included in this programme:

Christine Sullivan and Rob Flint, Generator, 2006, 4:00 min, colour, sound

George Gurdjieff, Hidden Symmetry 2, date unknown, 4:31 min, black & white, sound

Jim Shaw, Initiation Ritual of the 360 Degrees, 2002, 10:54 min, colour, sound

Matt Stokes, Long After Tonight, 2005, 6:40 min, colour, sound

Marcus Coates, Out of Season, 2000, 7:16 min, colour, sound

Alex Sanders, Fire Spirit Ritual, c.1970, 3:27 min, colour, sound

Bruce Nauman, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square,1967-68, 5:00 min extract, black & white, silent

Magali Reus, Background, 2009, 7:25 min, colour, sound

Catherine Sullivan, Triangle of Need (Olympian and Doves), 2007, 7:00 min, colour, sound

Michael Curran, All My Little Ducks, 1995, 7:00 min, black & white, sound

Kenneth Anger, Invocation of My Demon Brother, 1969, 10:30 min, colour, sound

Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, 1947-55, 8:00 min extract, black & white, sound

Sian Davies, Thebes, 2007, 7:52 min, colour, sound

Guy Sherwin, Man With Mirror, 1976/2006, 9:00 min, colour, sound

Breda Beban, Walk of Three Chairs, 2003, 10:00 min, colour, sound

Jim Shaw, The Whole: A Study in Oist Movement, 2009, 16:40 min, colour, sound

For more information and individual screening times please see www.ancientandmodern.org

Event: The Bookmobile Project

I have been invited to 'chair' a lecture/seminar/reading room event as part of The Bookmobile Project, which is a peripatetic project hosted by the publishing and curatorial initiative YH485 as part of Sideshow 2010. More information to follow soon, but in the meantime below is a brief outline for the project.

Journal Article: Moves towards the Incomprehensible Wild

My article ‘Moves towards the Incomprehensible Wild’ is going to be published in a forthcoming issue of the online journal Art & Research,  focusing on the theme, Art & Animality.

 Image: Dutton + Swindells


The article explores how for artists, Dutton + Swindells, the notion of ‘encounter’ or ‘event’ emerges as a particular manifestation of wildness. Their practice investigates whether it is possible to every truly encounter (or indeed produce) something wild, something that has not been already captured, classified, tamed. Bringing Dutton + Swindells’ practice into the proximity of Alain Badiou’s conceptualization of the event, my intent is to explore how within their work the event (of an encounter with the wild) promises towards the possibility of the new whilst asking whether such an event could be provoked or produced through a form of critical (artistic) practice.

Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild

The article will be published in Art & Animality, Volume 4 No 1 Autumn/Winter 2010

Co-edited by Ron Broglio

Contributors include:

Helen Bullard

Marcus Coates

Emma Cocker

Mark Dion

Susan McHugh and Steve Baker

Carolee Schneeman

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir & Mark Wilson

Jan Verwoert

Frederick Young

Background 

Art & Research is an artist-led, internationally peer-assessed open access e-journal of Research in Fine Art Practice, focused upon questions, contexts and methodologies of artistic research and practice. Art & Research aims to serve professional artists and academics, curators and critics, artistic researchers, postgraduate and doctoral research students and undergraduates, and to inform current pedagogical thought in a global context. Art & Research welcomes submissions from artists, researchers, academics, critics and curators which seek to engage with all areas of research in Fine Art practice and/or pedagogy. Submissions may take the form of interviews, analytical or polemical essays as well as audio, visual or text-based artworks which seek to address issues in / or are the outcomes of research in Fine Art practice.

Publication: Document

  

Open City have work published in the current issue of the journal Rubric, focusing on the theme, Document. A PDF version of the journal can be found here . 

Project: Urban Retreat

I will be working with artist Sophie Mellor on a new piece of writing, as the basis for a 'Manual of Marginal Places', within the context of her project, Urban Retreat: Routes into Uneasy Landscapes .

 

URBAN RETREAT

13 September - 3 October 2010


Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria

Lottie Child , Emma Cocker, Sophie Mellor , Laura Oldfield Ford, Clare Thornton 

Urban Retreat is a series of artists commissions, activities and events reflecting on the use and value of urban/rural landscapes. It takes Henry David Thoreau's Walden as a starting point, using socialised seclusion and public interaction to investigate the local economic and ecological landscape of Barrow-in-Furness.

Barrow's unusual landscape charts its industrial past and economic decline alongside its reclamation by both nature and current regeneration schemes. The commissioned artists will examine the urban and rural spaces. Their aim, as artists have always done, is to record our enduring relationship with the land - yet they will do this in a variety of ways with a range of materials themed around the urban and rural. 

Sophie Mellor will spend two weeks as an urban wanderer relying on the kindness of strangers and the bounty of the land to house and feed her. Clothed in an especially designed survival jacket by Clare Thornton, she will place herself directly in Barrow's marginalised landscapes, investing in its use and beauty through her interactions with people and place. 

Around this central, durational performance, there will be a series of free public events and activities. Lottie Child will run a Street Training session, investigating how to traverse both industrial and rural Barrow. Lottie has developed Street Training as a method to directly engage people with their surroundings through creative and playful behaviour combining parkour, movement, singing, conversation, games.

 Martin Norris of South Walney Nature Reserve will lead a 'Nature Walk' of Barrow's wastelands, looking at how nature colonises land left fallow by industry.

 Laura Oldfield Ford will take participants on a drawing 'drift' (walk) around Barrow's sites of regeneration, using drawing to reassess and document how industry, politics and economics have impacted the land and its use. 

As well as making the survival jacket for Sophie Mellor's urban wander, Clare Thornton will run a 'Survival Bag' workshop where participants will be invited to make and customise a bag to carry the items they need to negotiate their environment. 

At the end of her urban wander, Sophie Mellor will take audiences on a walk through the different environments she encountered, telling stories of her encounters and offering tastes of the wild and scavenged food she found on the way. 

Barrow-in-Furness Library will be hosting the Urban Retreat Lending Library, where library users can borrow books donated by Urban Retreat artists and invited patrons, for the duration of the project. 

Writer Emma Cocker will be corresponding via post with Sophie Mellor during her urban wander, and the resultant new writing will form the basis of 'Manual for Marginal Places' to be published in Spring 2011.

Event: If....

I will be 'in conversation' with artist Candice Jacobs at G39 in Cardiff on August 10th 2010, in relation to her current show there as part of G39's If.... season. More to follow soon.

Nottingham based Artist Candice Jacobs continues g39's If.... season. Jacobs works with a variety of media producing sound, video, painting and sculpture, with the intention of undermining the traditional role of the artist as retaining control and authorship over their work. Jacobs engages in what could be described as transactional work that involves the exchange of ideas and constructs with social groups or objects that become attached or connected to her through her many roles in daily life.

News: Drawing as a fundamental thinking tool

Relating to a number of projects in which I have been exploring drawing as a fundamental thinking tool or mode of 'productive knowledge - see Hyperdrawing , Drawing the Hypothesis , Oh how drawing thinks itself in me ), I have been invited to be a co-editor for the online journal TRACEY , which is an electronic open access journal dedicated to the presentation of drawing and the discussion of drawing practice.

TRACEY

* introduces a diverse range of material to a fast growing audience of practitioners, educators, students and researchers

* represents many perspectives on drawing including fine art, architectural design, graphics, product design and visualization

* sees drawing as a fundamental thinking tool

* advocates the value of drawing in professional and educational contexts

* provides a focus and forum for all aspects of drawing research

* crosses the boundaries of art, design, science, technology, education and life

* encourages participation and collaboration

Event: ANTI festival

I will be participating in the 'Writing, Language and Site' seminar as part of the 2010 ANTI festival, in Kuopio, Finland. The seminar programme is below. A full programme for the festival can be found here 

Below is a PDF version of the whole programme for this year's ANTI festival 

Publication: Peep/Show: a Taxonomic Exercise in Textual and Visual Seriality

“We suggest a fluid taxonomy. We would rather set things on fire than carve them in stone” –Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick.

The full text (no.1 – 10) produced as part of my collaboration with Open City, has been published as the inaugural text for the 2^nd Issue of Peep/Show: a Taxonomic Exercise in Textual and Visual Seriality , an electronic publishing adventure curated by US based poets/writers Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick. Behrendt and Gorrick had seen the ‘Field Proposals’ I had produced as part of ‘Field Station’ and invited me to submit a text work which worked on the principles of ‘seriality’ or of an ‘unfolding’. I was struck by a particular statement made by the curators of this project (above) as well as the idea of a publication dedicated to an 'unfolding'.

About THE CARNIVAL, PEEP/SHOW ISSUE #2

“Our second issue of Peep/Show is built around the sense that anything can happen when you put a lion-tamer and a human cannonball in the same room. It's about possibility, about disease we've never seen before, a viral opening, traveling on a train to the next town, reinvention, a deliberate reincarnation, the unfounded assumption that everything isn't already written, and the show that emerges from that dystopic assumption.”

Peepifesto

PEEP/SHOW is an electronic poetry publication of previously unpublished work by contemporary innovative writers. A new taxonomic category is presented every five months or so, and unfolds over the course of time, with a large chunk of serially-minded work by a different poet added every few weeks.

Possible uses and manipulation of constrained space

Just whose guided gaze?

fixed vantage point / hiding behind vs. exposing / reading vs. looking

a forbidden secret: a poem

Thomas Weynants, "Early Visual Media"

Through a hole into a vast scene, a panorama in a box

Anne Pundyk, "Unconsciousness Raising" at Brooklyn Rail, Sept 09

Stereoscope, viewmaster, camera obscura

Paul Thomas, "Reconsideration of Space"

serial unfolding

unspooling

undone

Taxonomy Vocabulary

John Kelsey on Rodarte

........to be continued as it occurs

Projects: drawing … walking … failing

I have recently been invited to participate in a number of proposed AHRC projects which in diverse ways extend some of the concerns emerging in my current research practice specifically in relation to failure, drawing and walking. These projects include the proposed research network bid 'The Art of Failure' (Laura Cull and Cormac Power); 'Oh how drawing thinks itself in me' (Helena Goldwater, Lucia King, Hester Reeve, Pak Keung Wan) and 'Walking Women' (Dee Hedden and Cathy Turner). More to follow as/when these projects develop.

Essay/text: Inbindable Volume

I have been invited to produce a text for a publication in conjunction with Inbindable Volume, an ambitious new multi-screen video installation by Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry. I am specifically interested in the term 'inbindable', and hope the text may provide a space to explore strategies - of elasticity, porosity, mobility, fragmentation, dispersal (even wildness) - whereby a set of ideas might evade or elude capture or containment. 

Information about Inbindable Volume

Inbindable Volume is a multi-screen video installation dealing with the journey between the conception of an idea, its materialisation and eventual decomposition/decommission, using architecture and books as its central motifs. The multiple screens journey through the Brutalist space of an empty library interior that unfolds in an assemblage of tracking shots. The concrete physicality of the architecture is sensuously rendered against the unseen imagined spaces alluded to within the books held in the space; drawing a parallel, perhaps, to Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Library of Babel in which the author imagines an infinite number of hexagonal libraries containing books with every possible ordering of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks.

The rhythm and texture of the film is driven by the voice of an omnipresent narrator, who describes the lifespan of a building from conception to abandonment - through a text that skips unsettlingly between past, present and future tense. The elements of the work conspire to generate multiple perspectives in time and space creating a state of flux between continual movement, and a sense of security engendered by the narrator's formal and reassuring tone.

Filmed in Birmingham's iconic Central Library, the city's most infamous example of Brutalist architecture, Inbindable Volume is an exploration of the journey between conception and materialization - both in architecture and books - and what becomes of ideologies after they have been realised in material form.

Launching VIVID's 2010/11 artists commissioning programme, the work has been developed during a three month residency at VIVID's project space in Eastside with the support of The Henry Moore Foundation, Birmingham City of Culture, and the Jan van Eyck Academie, an institute for research and production in the fields of fine art, design and theory in the Netherlands.

The exhibition opens at VIVID on 29 July and continues to 21 August 2010. The exhibition tours to Citric Gallery, Italy in March 2011.

karin kihlberg & reuben henry artists' statement

"Our work is embedded in society's contemporary habit of viewing the world through second-hand information; both in terms of current events, culture and history. How do these documents take form in our minds and what form would they take as an object, text or in a performance? How do documents become part of our own memories and how do they shape our perception of the world we live in?

Documentation, representation, and the narratives that bind history together are utilised by contemporary culture as routes to comprehend and consume the contemporary paradigm. In our work we take these same routes as phenomena to be explored, appropriated, transformed and confused in combination with established structures of drama and fictionalization.

We aim to capture uncertainties of the present and generate an unstable perception of time. We use subjective understandings and non-linear narrative as a method to see an event from alternative angles and perspectives. We are not bound to any particular medium, but are drawn instead to finding ways in which documentation can operate beyond representing the past."

Publication: ‘People, Places, Process: The Shops Project’

My essay 'Social Assemblage' on the work of FrenchMottershead has been published in the book ‘People, Places, Process: The Shops Project’ which will be officially launched on Monday 21 June 2010 in London.

‘People, Places, Process: The Shops Project’

A presentation and book launch by FrenchMottershead

Hosted by British author, historian and curator, Dr Mike Phillips OBE.

British artists FrenchMottershead (Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead) create art that explores ideas of identity, social ritual and the everyday public and private realms in which they are played out. One of their recent projects is ‘Shops’, an international project uncovering communities formed around independent, local traders. FrenchMottershead’s exploration of the connections between local traders and residents took them, among other places, to the city of Iasi, in north-eastern Romania. Here they engaged with shop-owners, staff and customers, documenting the encounters and also the stories of the people they have met. The Romanian part of ‘The Shops Project’ was supported by the Ratiu Foundation.

In collaboration with Site Gallery Sheffield, the major hub of contemporary art in Yorkshire, this Culture Power event will see FrenchMottershead present their project, with an emphasis on Iasi. With this occasion, the artists will also present the book resulting from their encounters, part of the ‘Shops’ project, around the world.

Book Launch: ‘People, Places, Process: The Shops Project’
by Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead. Site Gallery, 2010. ISBN: 978-1-899926-08-4
The book can be purchased on the evening at the special price of £9.95 (RRP £12.00).

‘People, Places, Process: The Shops Project’ was published to accompany FrenchMottershead’s ‘The Shops Project’ exhibition at Site Gallery, Sheffield, which took place from November 2009 to February 2010.

The residencies and work periods that resulted in work represented in the exhibition and this book took place in Bahia, Brazil (January 2008); Sao Paulo, Brazil (February - March 2008); Guangzhou, China (April - May 2008); Iasi, Romania (November - December 2008); Ljubljana, Slovenia (March - April 2009); Istanbul, Turkey (June - July 2009); and Sheffield, England (August - November 2009).

This publication compiles four years of research, documentation and artworks that have resulted from FrenchMottershead’s international Shops project, which looks at society through the lens of local shops.
Texts by the artists and local writers from the cities they've visited sit alongside contributions from Peter Jackson, Professor of Human Geography at The University of Sheffield, writer and lecturer Emma Cocker, and artist and writer Tim Etchells. Together they show, describe and analyse unique customers' and shop owners' stories in a range of different shopping landscapes, emphasising their differences but also revealing their connections and common grounds.

Private View of ‘The Shops Project’ in London
A part of ‘The Shops Project’ will be on display at the Ratiu Foundation / Romanian Cultural Centre, from 21 to 30 June 2010. 

Writing/Text: Experiments along the brink of I

"The challenge then, is to figure out a way beyond and through the impossibility of community. This is not to invoke a transcendent plateau from which one will find a new synthetic resolution free of contradictions. Quite the contrary, it is meant to suggest the impossibility of total consolidation, wholeness and unity [...] and perhaps more importantly, to suggest that such an impossibility is a welcome premise upon which a collective artistic praxis, as opposed to a 'community based art' might be theorised', Miwon Kwon, p.154.

"Research should no longer be done off to one side, in a school, a library, a laboratory. Where one lives needs to become a laboratory for researching, for mapping directly, the living body itself, oneself as world-forming inhabitant ... there needs to be a communal devising, selecting and combining of techniques that will strengthen organisms-persons and help them to regenerate themselves; results need to be pooled and compared" Architectural Body, Madeline Gins + Arakawa, pxx

Whilst at the PSi Performing Publics conference in Toronto I was invited to observe the following workshop, with the view to producing a new piece of writing in response for a forthcoming publication. The workshop was led by artists Sara Wookey and Bianca Sclair Mancini and explored the city through various forms of choreographic intervention. Wookey and Sclair Mancini's collaborative practice resonates with many of the concerns that have been developing within my wider practice, especially in relation to my own collaboration with the investigative art project, Open City.

I am tentatively developing a text in response to this work entitled, Experiments Along the Brink of I, where I envisage exploring a number of tactics wherein the distinction between self and other (and indeed world) becomes blurred or folded -  the practices of gleaning gestures, witnessing/attendance, following, flocking, copying, creating synchronicity in rhythm, becoming architectural.

Documentation of 'Movement and the City' workshop

Essay/Publication: Distancing the if and then

Below is a commissioned text for the forthcoming publication 'Drawing a Hypothesis - Figures of Research', (ed.) Nikolaus Gansterer, (Jan Van Eyck Academy and Verlag Springer ). The publication will include contributions from Hanneke Grootenboer (an art historian of the early modern period) and Andreas Schinner (a cryptologist/physicist).


More on the publication to follow soon. 



The text was prompted by a series of 'figures' sent by the artist Nikolaus Gansterer as the provocation towards thinking. The 'figures' included:

Nikolaus Gansterer says of the project 'Drawing an Hypothesis is a publication project dealing with the relationship between science and fiction by reflecting methods of description and interpreta-

tion. My drawings serve as a visual starting point for a dialogue about ideas on ideas. The idea is a central category in philosophy and can also be considered as the driving force behind any creative process. Often this pivotal moment when coming up with an idea is mystifyed especially within arts and science. I am interested delving more into the history of ideas, their critical and visionary potential paired with dubious outgrowths. By inviting different persons from various backgrounds and professional skills (artists/scientists/writers) to participate in the project I am building up a collection  of reading and interpreting images. I am sending out a series of drawings to the participants asking for a micrology (= short explanation/text/speculation) about what they see/read in the graphic display. According to the interpretations I am creating a new series of images to circumstantiate or even negate the supposed theory. By re-returning them to the same interpretor reasking for a new micrology a chain reaction is started. This process of actually “Drawing an Hypothesis” continues as long there is an action potential between me and the interpretators'.

Text work: new Open City texts

I am currently working with Open City (Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday) to develop new work to take to Toronto as part of the forthcoming PSi Performing Publics events in June, and also for new festival contexts for the UK in the Autumn. Here are 2 new postcard texts (No.9 and No.10), which will complete the series of cards made in collaboration with Open City (2007 - 2010). We are currently working on a limited edition foldable pamphlet which will be designed by Joff+Ollie, for bringing all ten texts together for the first time, alongside a series of instruction and visual propositions. If you would like a copy of this publication please email emma.cocker@ntu.ac.uk.

Event: Life - A Users Manual

I will be chairing this event (below) as part of Art Sheffield 2010 Life: A Users Manual . I hope that this event will provide a space to further tease out ideas which have been emerging in some of my recent writing including Performing Stillness and Performing Collectivity, around the affective experience of collectivity and community (particularly through the prism of Spinoza's Ethics).

In Conversation Event

Saturday 24 April 2pm

Showroom Cinema

Frederique Bergholtz will discuss some of the issues raised by Art Sheffield 2010 ­ Life: A Users Manual. Frederique Bergholtz is a co-curator of Art Sheffield 2010 and director of the rolling platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.  

She will be in conversation with participating artist (and lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University) Becky Shaw, following which there will be opportunity for discussion, facilitated by Emma Cocker (Writer and Senior Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University)

Context

The title of Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual, refers to Georges Perec’s 1978 novel in which he builds up a detailed picture of the inhabitants of a single apartment block by describing the spaces in which they live, the objects in their rooms, the photos and paintings on the walls. There is something to this concentration on detail and the relationship between the individual and the collective that seems timely to explore when we feel as never before, especially with the current crisis, the effects of economic and social pressures on our everyday actions. Attempting to grapple with such global changes and not be overwhelmed by them, venturing to ask ‘where am I in this?’ is where art and the encounters it creates can be most powerful.

A key concern is to explore the notion of ‘affect’. Often used interchangeably with the experience of feeling or emotion, it is essentially an ability to affect others and in turn to be affected by them. Art Sheffield 2010 - Life: A User’s Manual proposes that unspectacular acts of everyday ‘affect’ might be a way to chart a path through current circumstances. Affect, not understood in the romantic sense as the catharsis often promised by art, but as the potential for embodied interpersonal experience which may suggest the next possible step within the bigger picture.