Publication: On Not Knowing: How Artists Think

The publication On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (eds.) Rebecca Fortnum and Elizabeth Fisher (Black Dog Publishing, 2013) to which I have contributed a text 'Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected' and two artist's pages (in collaboration with Clare Thornton and Rachel Lois Clapham respectively)  is now available here. 

How far does our openness to aesthetic experience, and new forms of knowledge, depend on our capacity to enter and indulge states of wonder and awe, doubt and failure, ignorance and play? How critical are these conditions to the creative process? How do artists invite the unknown into their creative practice? On Not Knowing brings together contemporary artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines to explore the role of ‘not knowing’ within the creative process. The state of ‘not knowing’ or engaging with the unknown is an important aspect of all research. For artists it is crucial, as the making process often balances a strong sense of direction with a more playful or meditative state of exploration and experimentation.

Contributions include:

Dennis Atkinson, Pedagogy of the Not Known

Phyllida Barlow (in conversation with Elizabeth Fisher), Unidentified Foreign Objects

Sonia Boyce and Sarah Cole in conversation, Gulp

Emma Cocker, Tactics for Not Knowing – Preparing for the Unexpected

Cornford & Cross, Mobilising Uncertainty

Elizabeth Fisher, In a Language You Don’t Understand

Rebecca Fortnum, Creative Accounting – Not Knowing in Talking and Making

Rachel Jones, On the Value of Not Knowing – Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be

Ian Kiaer, Studio

London Fieldworks, Towards the Reification of a Wandering Mind

Office of Experiments, On Being Overt- Secrecy and Covert Culture

Gary Peters, Ahead of the Yes and No – Heidegger on Not Knowing and Art

Jyrki Siukonen, Made in Silence? On Words and Bricolage

Andrew Warstat, Unteachable and Unlearnable, The Ignorance of Artists

Image: Sarah Cole, Loving is Work, performance video documentation from A Million Minutes,  developed in collaboration with Islington Carer’s Centre, 2013. Camera and post-production: Karl Cresser. Courtesy of the artist.

Event: In Imagination - The Future reflected in Art and Argument

I will be giving the  closing key note presentation at a one-day symposium, In Imagination: the future reflected in art and argument, in conjunction with the UK premiere of Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties, at the University of Sheffield, 4^th October 2013. 

Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said "I have a dream", he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. […] The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real. Brian Eno, ‘The Big Here and Long Now.’

Comprised of keynote papers and two panels, and featuring a variety of speakers from both professional performance and academic worlds, In Imagination: the future reflected in art and argument will address ideas of imaginative spaces, determination and conceptual summoning as well as discussing the use of theatre as a tool to speculate, predict and conceptualise. The event is organised around two panels: (1) Imaging the Future/Perceiving the future: exploring the prophetic possibilities of imagined worlds, their reflection and affect on the present, and the cognitive relation of the mind to making actual; and (2) Performing the future: Can performance evoke/anticipate the future? How might it do so? By what means can theatre speculate, predict, conceptualise or otherwise open up a future space? Opening Keynote by Tim Etchells and Terry O’Connor (Forced Entertainment); Closing Keynote by Emma Cocker (Nottingham Trent University). Confirmed speakers include Steven Connor (University of Cambridge); Matt Adams (Blast Theory); Joe Kelleher (University of Roehampton); Cathy Shrank (University of Sheffield); Johan Seibers (UCLAN); Carmen Szabo (University of Sheffield); Jess Edwards (MMU); Fabienne Collignon (University of Sheffield).

Proposed paper: What now, what next – kairotic imagination and the unfolding future seized

Taking its point of departure from Forced Entertainment’s new performance Tomorrow’s Parties, this presentation considers two different modes of future-oriented imagination operative within creative practice, shifting attention from the future as it is imagined within art and argument (as projection or ‘vision’) towards an understanding of an ever-emergent future that is endlessly seized and inhabited through the live and improvisatory act of imagining. Turning from the product (what is imagined) towards the process of imagining, the intent is to explore how within artistic practice the creative production of the future (as different or otherwise) is perhaps less one of planning or proposing future-possible worlds, but rather emerges through the restless capacity for conceptualizing an insurgent ‘or’. Contraction of the word ‘other’, ‘or’ does not simply present an alternative to a given reality (according to the binary logic of either/or, this or that) but instead might be considered a site of repeated intervention and invention (or … or … or), disrupting the illusory continuity of the past>present>future (all is, as was, as will be) in search of multiple lines of flight. Here, the imagination is conceived as a kairotic capability, an improvisatory tendency located at the threshold between the ‘as is’ of the present and the ‘not yet’ of the future, that fleeting moment of opportunity wherein things might change or else remain the same.

Publication: infinite

My publication infinite, part of the series Lemonade everything was so infinite., published by LemonMelon is now available here.

infinite 
Emma Cocker

LemonMelon 2013 | £5 | Softback | 29 x 21 cm | ISBN 978 1 908260 07 9

There are thousands of books in the British Library whose title refers to the act of searching. There are at least as many books referring to loss. The infinite cycle of searching and losing, losing and searching, might be conceived from two different perspectives: (from left-to-right) in Sisyphean terms, akin to the rolling of a rock to the top of the hill only to roll back down again, or else (from right-to-left) as a model of Penelopian labour, like the endless unraveling of a weave such that by morning the task can begin afresh.

More about the publication series

Lemonade everything was so infinite.

'Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos.' was one of Franz Kafka's last sentences in his Aus den Gesprächsblättern published in Briefe 1902–1924. Hélène Cixous, who repeatedly wrote about this sentence, translated it as 'Limonade tout était si infini.'. This is translated in the english version of the Hélène Cixous Reader as 'Lemonade everything was so infinite'.

Cixous's translation of Kafka's sentence 'Lemonade everything was so infinite.' forms the basis of a series of seven titles written by seven different writers / artists – David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson. Each title explores one of the seven segments of this sentence – 'Lemonade', ' __', 'everything', 'was', 'so', 'infinite', '.'. This form of publishing does not only aim to investigate Cixous's translation of the sentence, but also intends to explore the grammatical connection of the different elements within the sentence, the possible interconnectivity / collaboration of the different voices, the words in their own grammatically disconnected function etc ...


Writing: Kinesthetic Universe

Images: Victoria Gray, from Universe II and Universe III, 2013

I have been invited to produce a new piece of writing in parallel to Kinesthetic Universe, a forthcoming film by artist Victoria Gray. Gray makes live work that is located between performance and sculpture; performances that are sculptures and sculptures that are performances. Using minimal materials, primarily the body, the work explores the politics of movement and ways in which sociocultural factors inscribe and exert control over the body. Through performance actions, the work considers how the body might be antagonistic and resistant to dominant techniques of corporeal inscription, silencing and subordination. More to follow soon.