Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title Not Yet There, Cocker's research focuses on the process of artistic exploration and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ emerging therein; on models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist the pressure of a single, stable position by remaining wilfully unresolved. Her mode of working unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to producing texts parallel to and as art practice. Cocker's recent writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; Reading/Feeling (Affect), 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016.

Workshop Call: Live Coding Alternatives



Live Coding Alternatives Workshop call. Call for position papers and performances as part of Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference, 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus University, Denmark. 
http://www.livecodenetwork.org/live-coding-alternatives/

Organizers:
 Alan Blackwell, Reader in Interdisciplinary Design, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge (UK); Emma Cocker, Reader in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University (UK); Geoff Cox, Associate Professor, Participatory IT research centre, Aarhus University (DK)

Live Coding Alternatives is an interdisciplinary workshop (‘live laboratory’) for testing and exploring live coding as a creative, aesthetic and potentially political practice for constructing ‘critical alternatives’ within both computing and everyday life. The workshop explores this emergent field and aims to open up deeper critical questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. It is structured around live research practices of writing, presentation and performance, collaboratively interrogated through discussion, and the development of critical frameworks that reflect the live coding dynamic. Live Coding Alternatives emphasizes the relation of live coding to the cultivation of ‘alternative’, potentially subversive, ways of operating within contemporary culture. In addition the workshop explores the alternative possibilities offered by live coding practice as able in itself to generate epistemic claims through software development, improvised live performance and ‘artistic research’. The intention is not only to propose how live coding transforms code and coding practice but to investigate the transformational potential inherent within the process of live coding itself. We ask what possibilities for change and action does the practice of live coding suggest? What alternative ways of ‘being operative’ are evoked? We welcome analytical, theoretical and reflective papers from diverse disciplines but especially want to encourage expanded notions of live coding in the form of performances and alternative presentation modes.

Initial areas of interest might include:

* Live coding and performance writing, interplay of text and code, experimental notation practices

* Live coding, its transformative potential and politics

* Live coding, temporality and just-in-time production

* Live coding, alternative epistemologies and artistic research

* Live coding, subjectivity and ‘life’ coding

* Live coding and attribution in reputation economies

* Live coding as the persistent traces of interaction

Position papers will be circulated in advance. Working throughout the day, there will be a critical interlocutor and facilitator, helping excavate and elaborate key ideas connecting live coding to the cultivation of various ‘critical alternatives’. Results of the workshop will be published on the Live Coding Network website.

Important dates:

Call goes live: 02 April

Proposals due: 20 May (email 300 word proposals to gcox@dac.au.dk)

Results made known: 31 May

Workshop: 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus
About Critical Alternatives: 1975-1985-1995-2005 — the decennial Aarhus conferences have traditionally been instrumental for setting new agendas for critically engaged thinking about information technology. The conference series is fundamentally interdisciplinary and emphasizes thinking that is firmly anchored in action, intervention, and scholarly critical practice. In 2015, we see critical alternatives in alignment with utopian principles—that is, the hope that things might not only be different but also radically better. At the same time, radically better alternatives don’t emerge out of nowhere: they emerged from contested analyses of the mundane present and demand both commitment and labor to work towards them. More information here .Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference

Research Event: Unconditional Love

Emma Cocker and Joanne Lee (Fine Art, NTU) are curating Care + Attend, a strand for Unconditional Love, the Society of Artistic Research Spring Event taking place at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, April 30 - 1 May 2015. Unconditional Love will explore how caring and attention is expressed in such practices as artistic research, open access, auditing, peer-reviewing and critique, as well as the tug of war between science, magic and art on the issue of love. 

Care + Attend 
Curated by Emma Cocker and Joanne Lee 
Care + Attend comprises a constellation of fragments and extracts - of different intensities and durations - where the exposition of research emerges as a poetic and performative event, generating moments of potential resonance and dialogue. This event explores the theme Unconditional Love through the principles (perhaps even methodologies) of care and attention, as applied within specific (artistic) practices of both the everyday and of the self. Beginning with the observation that both curate and curiosity have shared etymology in the term ‘care’, Care + Attend seeks to develop a research vocabulary based on receptivity, openness, fidelity, integrity, intimacy, friendship and commitment (whilst not ignoring the parallel principles of distraction, inattention, the act of closing one’s eyes or of looking away).  Cocker and Lee have invited a range of artists & writers to share and reflect on their own processes, philosophies and politics of care and attention, and to present these through live performance/actions, screenings and spoken word. 

Contributors include: Kate Briggs, Daniela Cascella, Belén Cerezo, Emma Cocker, Steve Dutton + Neil Webb, Victoria Gray, Rob Flint, Mark Leahy, Joanne Lee, Martin Lewis, Sarat Maharaj, Brigid McLeer, Hester Reeve, and Lisa Watts. The programme and abstracts for Care + Attend can be read below. An archive of the event - with documentation and reflection will be available here.

     

The programme for Unconditional Love can be downloaded here. 
Booking for the event is here.

Society for Artistic Research (SAR) is an international, non-profit organisation that nurtures, connects and disseminates artistic research as specific practices of creating knowledge and insight. SAR facilitates a range of encounters for its community of artistic practitioners in the pursuit of transformative understanding that impacts on political and societal processes as well as on cultures of research and learning. SAR has an international membership drawn from individual artists, as well as academic and non-academic institutions.

Publication: Unruly Utterances




UNRULY UTTERANCES: PARTICIPATION, CRITICALITY AND COMPASS FESTIVAL 2014 Compass Live Art announce the publication of Unruly Utterances: Participation, Criticality and Compass Festival 2014. 

Keen to open up critical conversations about live art and socially engaged practice in the region Compass invited editors Yvonne Carmichael and Amelia Crouch to commission 10 practitioners from different backgrounds to reflect on the broad themes of participation, audience, criticality and writing in a series of short essays and provocations inspired by their own practice and numerous works in Compass Festival 2014. Contributors include Andy Abbott, Emma Cocker, Patrick Coyle, Victoria Gray, Gillie Kleiman, Annie Lloyd, Gill Park, Harold Offeh, Nathan Walker, Adam Young. An online version of the publication can be found here.




Symposium: The Alternative Document


The Alternative Document, 2-3 July, Lincoln Performing Arts Centre
The Alternative Document symposium explores the relationship between event and documentation as a provocation between the text /visual record and ephemeral art practices as a negotiation between sites that are often represented as polar opposites. These sites could be imagined as a territory where the distinction between land and sea is blurred, for example in alluvial plains, where the interplay between its different stages replenishes and revives each state. Rather than prioritizing one form over another, each manifestation generates potential for further responses, creating an ongoing work. The full call for papers can be read here.

 In collaboration with Clare Thornton, I am currently developing the following presentation, which has been accepted for inclusion in this conference.
The Italic I: Between Live-ness and the Lens
The Italic I is an artistic collaboration exploring the different states of potential made possible through purposefully surrendering to a repeated fall. The fall is encountered almost exclusively through its photographic document, considered less as a pale imitation of live-ness but rather as a means through which to ‘see it again’, differently. Photography repeats the live event, yet the intent is not to reproduce or re-present, as present an alternative perspective (through the camera’s capacity for ‘seeing’ faster or slower than the eye).
The live performance of falling is mediated through the lens, slowing and extending its different episodes, yet, the intent is not to capture what a fall looks like, but rather to reflect on its interiority (its ‘inner movement’ as lived experience). We seek a visual vocabulary for the invisible register of intensity or sensation within falling, the force of what-cannot-always-be-seen. Our documents make tangible an experience not actually visible in the live event; where paradoxically, the document is somehow closer to the live(d) experience than the encounter with the performance itself. Moreover, the document itself is performed live, ephemeral. Staged using slide technology as an ever-changing permutational flow, the cross-fading of non-consecutive images generates a virtual performance (a fall) that did not exist in reality, but which perhaps comes closer to the feeling-of-the-fall. The work explores how lens technologies might have the capacity to evoke a quality of live-ness not simply the visual document of life, addressing those expanded modalities of performance and performativity - those emergent temporalities and subjectivities - produced at the threshold where live and lens meet.

Book launch event: Lemonade everything was so infinite.



Lemonade  everything was so infinite.

Hundred Years Gallery
13 Pearson Street, London E2 8JD

Sunday 15th February 2015,
3.30–6.30pm


The book launch of 
Lemonade  everything was so infinite.
 by David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, Rachel Lois Clapham
 took place on 15th February, Hundred Years Gallery, London.  For the launch, using a variety of apparatuses and improvisational techniques, Douglas Benford, Steve Beresford, Regina Blanca and Manuela Barczewski played a selection of pages of ‘Lemonade  everything was so infinite.’, published by LemonMelon.






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