Book Launch: Reading/Feeling

Above are images from the launch event that I organised at Site Gallery for the publication Reading/Feeling, a new reader that considers the meaning of affect in theory and artistic practice, programmed in conjunction with artist Anna Barham’s residency Suppose I Call a Man a Horse, or a Horse a Man? The publication Reading/Feeling draws together a selection of texts by theoreticians, artists and curators that were read in If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’s reading groups taking place in Amsterdam, Sheffield and Toronto over the past two years, alongside newly commissioned essays from Tanja Baudoin, Emma Cocker, and Jacob Korczynski and contributions by reading group members including Stephen Bowler, Alison J Carr, Belen Cerezo, Victoria Gray, Linda Kemp, Hester Reeve and Julie Swallow. The Sheffield reading group took place at Site Gallery in dialogue with the exhibition Of All Possible Things by Jeremiah Day, who also contributed to the Reading/Feeling publication. Reading/Feeling was launched at Site Gallery with a series of readings and performance actions by members of the Sheffield reading group including myself, Hester Reeve, Allie Carr and Linda Kemp, alongside a performance reading by Anna Barham.

New work: The Italic I

"Vertigo looms, on the way to syncope. No longer the disordered vertigo of the first discomfort, not the ground falling away. It is a voluntary vertigo, radiating control". Catherine Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture.

"A diagonal helps to temper the excessiveness of the One". Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

The Italic I is a new body of work and ideas forming part of Tacturiency, my collaboration with Clare Thornton. Working in collaboration, Cocker + Thornton explore the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. The studio is approached as a gymnasium, a training space for rehearsing, isolating and interrogating distinct moments or stages within falling. No longer considered an event to be avoided or protected against, falling is apprehended willfully and consciously as an exercise of both mind and body, tested out in physical and cognitive terms. By repeatedly staging a series of falls, Cocker + Thornton attempt to slow and extend the duration of falling in order to suspend and elaborate upon its discrete phases or scenes:

* Softening the Ground – setting up the conditions

* Preparing to Fall – warming and flexing

* Entering the Arc – trust, twist, torque

* A Commitment Made – working against impulse

* Letting Go – a liquid state

* Voluntary Vertigo – ilinx, inclination

* Becoming Diagonal – the italic i

* Touching Limits – tilt towards (the other)

* Ecstatic Impotency – the jouissance of impuissance

* Folding of Attention – heightened interiority

* Embodiment/Disembodiment – mind body partition

* Breathless – ventilating the idea

* Formless – horizontality

* Voluptuous Recovery – return, yet charged

* Recalibrate … Loop – desire to repeat

Through practice-based enquiry, Cocker + Thornton reflect on the capacity of voluntary falling for inoculating the body to the imagined threat of the fall and the experience of uncertainty and disorientation therein. Falling is instead considered as a kairotic site (of opportunity) for producing the vertiginous pleasure of unexpected forms of embodied knowledge and augmented subjectivity, activated in and through active inhabitation of the perceived passivity and impotency often associated with the fall.

New writing: Live Notation - Reflections on a Kairotic Practice

My text Live Notation: Reflections on a Kairotic Practice, a response to my encounter with the work of the Live Notation Unit at Arnolfini Gallery on  27^th July 2012, has been selected for development as part of a forthcoming issue of Performance Research Journal, issue Vol 18, No.5. 'On Writing and Digital Media' (eds.) Ric Allsopp and Jerome Fletcher.    

Background to Performance Research issue Vol 18, No.5. 'On Writing and Digital Media', edited by Jerome Fletcher with Ric Allsopp

Although the emergent field of digital writing is rife with references to performance, they remain relatively untheorized. Certain theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles have insisted on the inherent performativity of digital text: ‘Less an object than an event, the digital text emerges as a dance between artificial and human intelligences, machine and natural languages as these evolve together through time’. But in the main, analysis or investigation of performance is restricted to the relationship between the text output (on the interface or projected into a performance space) and the live body either responding performatively to that text, or else generating text through performance. There has been little attempt to enfold an understanding of digital text performance within the wider context of the ‘turn to performance’ that has taken place among the humanities in recent decades. It is against this background of performance studies, ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, the ethnography of ritual, the performance of self and gender, and performance writing, that this issue of Performance Research will interrogate how writing performs in digital media.

While not excluding the investigation of live performance and its relation to digital writing and texts, the issue seeks to broaden the scope of the inquiry to include: interactivity between digital language and the body; the performative gesture(s) of the hand and fingers (digital text) on the interface; the performativity of language itself on the screen; social performance or how digital texts ‘perform’ us; the performance of codes and scripting; machinic performance, i.e. what does the engineer mean by performance.

In other words, we will be looking at the different modes of performance as they are manifest across the whole digital environment (dispositif). In order to give a fuller account of this complex of performative modes, we will also be investigating how they interact and collaborate with each other.

Writing: Seeing Shadows Requires Certain Blindness to the Light

Traci Kelly, Feeling it for You (mono print). Photograph: Marco Teschke

Below is a text produced from my experience of being a Seer-in-Residence’ at the invitation of Traci Kelly, in response to her exhibition of mono-prints collectively entitled Feeling it for You (Perspective).