Publication: On Not Knowing

I have been invited to contribute a chapter to the forthcoming publication On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, (eds.) Rebecca Fortnum, Reader in Fine Art, University of the Arts London and Lizzie Fisher, curator, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge University, (Kettles Yard, 2013)

The publication On Not Knowing: How Artists Think will draw together a number of contemporary thinkers from a range of disciplines along with artists to explore the place of ‘not knowing’ within the creative process.   It is conceived as an examination of the subject through practice and theory and will include both written essays and artists’ projects. The state of ‘not knowing’ or engaging with the unknown is a clearly acknowledged important aspect of all research. For artists it is crucial, as during the making process they may move between a strong sense of direction and a more playful or meditative state of exploration and experimentation. Within this process a sense of not knowing what it is they are doing can be as important as clear intentions.  The book will examine states such as ignorance, wonder, awe, potential and recognizing the new, as well as reflect on how artists formulate strategies of not knowing and ‘play’ within their decision making process. Contributors include Professor Gary Peters (York St John), Associate Professor Rachel Jones (George Mason), Associate Prof Neal White (Bournemouth) and Dr Jyrki Siukonen (Finnish Academy) as well as artists Cornford and Cross, Sonia Boyce, Ian Kiaer and Phyllida Barlow. The publication builds on a symposium held at the invitation of Kettle’s Yard, to accompany the exhibition Material Intelligence in 2009.

For my contribution to On Not Knowing: How Artists Think  I am envisaging a creative prose text that elaborates and reflects on a series of propositional practices or tactics for producing the conditions of not knowing. Excavating ideas from some of my recent research and practice, I want to explore how the state of ‘not knowing’ or the practice of engaging with the unknown is an important aspect of all research, but is also one that might often need to be actively courted, conjured or produced. I am interested in methods (tactics even) that attempt to set up the conditions of not knowing or which actively attempt to stall or suspend the moment of knowing, of decision, or the fixing of things into form or thought. I anticipate that the text will consist of a series of episodes or sections that elaborate and reflect on a different practice or tactic for producing the conditions of not knowing.

These might include:

* Ideas relating to the desire to be led astray – wandering, errancy, getting lost, misdirection, the principle of the maguffin
* Tactics for encountering the unclassified – ways of producing an encounter with that which is beyond the comprehensible, a move towards opacity and the ‘incomprehensible wild’.

* Practicing the fall from knowing: surrendering to the fall & the not knowing of syncope.

* The conjectural: tactics for distancing the ‘if’ and ‘then’.

* Chance and the paradoxical ‘not knowing’ within rule-based operations; the giving over of agency in order to be surprised.

* The fragmented and fragmentary as states of not knowing

* Techné - between cunning (metis) and opportunity (kairos): improvising tactics for navigating the not yet known.

Event: Where does thinking/making happen?

Presentation as part of an event Studio/Situation, where members of the fine art team at Nottingham Trent University were invited to respond to the question, “Where does making & thinking happen within my practice?” or else perhaps ‘Where is my studio?” Building on recent discourses examining the role of both studios and situations within contemporary art practice, the event examined different perspectives and strategies relating to where (and how) artists make and think.

As part of this presentation, I addressed the important of my own studio as a space for endless reassembly, making and unmaking, where ideas are never resolved as such but endlessly revisited and rewoven. 



I am interested in Penelopian labour (the weave and unweave of a practice) - the doing and undoing; the holding of ideas together, and their disassembly, recombination. For me, studio is where piles of books are endlessly resorted, re-stacked, a place for shuffling ideas and works. Studio thinking is unfixed, an ever-turning over; always dissolving or collapsing before it ever gets too certain or sure. Once again, I return to a quote from Luce Irigaray when I think of my own use of a studio, where the search seems less for fixed and definite 'thoughts' and 'forms', but rather for that illusive "'other meaning' which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed, immobilised". 

New Work: Live Writing (Feeling it for You)

“The essence of language is to be articulated. Such articulations can be as smooth as one wishes; they are no less divisive for all that. In order to language to function, signs must be isolable one from the other (otherwise they would not be repeatable), At every level (phonetic, semantic, syntactic, and so on) language has its own laws of combination and continuity, but its primary material is constructed of irreducible atoms (phonemes for spoken language, and for written, signs whose nature varies according to the system in question: in alphabetic writing, for example, the distinctive unit is the letter). Whoever says ‘articulation’ always says, in the final instance, ‘divisible into minimal units’: the articulus is the particle. Language is the hierarchical combination of bits. Liquid, on the contrary … is indivisible” Yve Alain Bois, 'Liquid Words', in Formless: A Users Guide, p124.

Tests from a series of new ‘Live Writings’ generated from my experience as ‘Seer-in-Residence’ (see posts below). Live Writing  (working title) is a new method of producing writing that I am currently playing with, provoked specifically through my experience as a Seer-in-Residence. Still very much a working approach at present, my intent is to explore the possibility of a form of live writing operating at the nascent point of words coming into being before collapsing, where language appears somehow reluctant to become solidified into coherent sentences or legible meaning.

As with the Close Readings, I am considering how strategies of skimming and the visual encounter with words 'close up' produces other kinds of meaning, where words are not always distinguishable as discrete signifying units, but instead appear liquid, their sense blurred. I am thinking about the possibility of a language for reflecting the not-quite-seen or captured, for reflecting the sense of the glimpsed. Visually, the live writings perhaps point to these moments of blindness within perception, to ellipses and eclipses within witnessing, rendered as a not-yet of language punctured through with gaps and holes. 

Emma Cocker, Live Writing (Feeling it for You)

Presented as a poem or even score of sorts, the live writings perhaps also intimate towards the possibility of reading or vocalisation. Blindness becomes breathlessness; the not being-able-to-fully-grasp of language articulated through syncopated speech-acts, assemblages of plosive phonemes and vowel sounds, of hyperventilations and gasps.  

My experience of the Seers-in-Residence project has also provoked me to think a little more about the relation  between eclipses and ellipsis, which I now hope to develop further through new visual/textual work (for example see test below) and new writing. Both eclipses and ellipsis indicate towards an obscuring, something hidden from view. Ékleipsis — an ancient Greek word referring to a state of abandonment or downfall, the ceasing of something to exist. Élleipsis — an omission. Falling short … the dot dot dot that marks the space of awkward silence or of momentary pausing, the removal of extraneous detail, the dissipation of unfinished thought.

Emma Cocker, Eclipsing Ellipsis, 2013

Emma Cocker, Eclipsing Ellipsis, 2013