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.

Project: Point Line Time - drawing and the site of the page



I have been invited to contribute to POINT LINE TIME - a drawing research project led by artist and writer Tamarin Norwood. 

 “POINT LINE TIME is a drawing research project led by artist and writer Tamarin Norwood through a 12-month residency at Spike Island, Bristol. The residency project aims to examine the spatial and temporal attributes of the drawing process — the space and the time around the page — in terms of their relationship to the object of drawing, the subject or body doing the drawing, and the body of marks left on the page. This research will develop through studio-based experiments that engage with the expanded field of drawing, moving beyond the pencil and the page towards towards three-dimensional and four-dimensional reinterpretations of the point of contact between drawing instrument and support. Implicit in this studio-based approach to research is a belief that genuinely new insight can be reached by means of a "blind" and "groping" (Derrida 1990) movement through a breadth of focused activity, each point of experimentation leading to the next without a given end in sight. This attitude of (knowing?) "not-knowingness" (Fisher and Fortnum 2013) has much in common with the particular myopic or groping 'eye' of the pencil lead, which is continually in movement at the point of drawing and is too close to the page to 'see' the configuration of marks it leaves on the surface. Writing and linguistic representation form a substantial component of the project: the diverse ways in which writing creates, describes and represents exist in counterpoint to the diverse ways in which drawing creates, describes and represents. Likewise as the pencil gropes along the surface of the page in drawing so too, quite differently, does the pen grope along the surface of the page in writing. These near-parallels will inform the structure of the residency, as material experiments seek near-equivalence in textual experiments, and as the project as a whole informs the writing of an extended text exploring the surface of the page in drawing and writing. Studio research will take place in dialogue with an interdisciplinary network of researchers and practitioners spanning the fields of sign language, choreography, poetry, geography, additivism, acoustics and composition, each field bringing a new inflection to the space and time around the page. Details of contributors, and how aspects of our conversations and collaborations will be made public, are here.” Contributors include Morehshin Allahyari, Emma Cocker, Antonia Barnett-McIntosh, Martina Conti, Daniela Cascella, Kyra Pollitt, Tom Chivers, Daniel Rourke. 


Publication: Vitality Gestures and Embodied Diagrammatics






In the midst of ‘gestures of (re)searching’: intense reading-wording-dialoguing-transcribing-discussing-writing. During the Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations of the Line Winter Lab (Vienna, Tanzquartier), we - myself, Mariella Greil and Nikolaus Gansterer - are working together to develop content for a book chapter entitled Choreo-graphic Figures: Vitality Gestures and Embodied Diagrammatics, for inclusion in the forthcoming publication Body Diagrams (eds.) Irene Mittelberg and Alexander Gerner (2017).  The chapter develops from a paper that we presented at the conference Body Diagrams: On the Epistemic Kinetics of Gesture back in 2014. In the first part of this residency, we have been developing ideas (developed in previous labs around the relation of 'figuring' and the 'figure' through reading and discussion. The second phase shifts to the Method lab space (see below) at Tanzquartier where we will continue to explore through practicing together.

Choreo—graphic Figures: Vitality Gestures and Embodied Diagrammatics
Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil
Abstract
Drawing on the artistic research project Choreo—graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 — 2017), this chapter explores how we have practiced a shift within our collaboration from the disciplinary gestures of drawing, writing and choreography towards the aesthetic-epistemological gesture of artistic (re)searching, to give tangible articulation to the pre-gestural register of ‘vitality forces and affects’ (which we call figuring) operating before, between and beneath the more readable gestures of artistic practice. Bringing our practice-as-research into dialogue with theory (including Brandstetter, Flusser, Manning, Massumi, Sabisch, Stern) we reflect on our own attempt to render communicable the dynamic experience of figuring within the creative process, through the production of (choreo—graphic) figures, an expanded system of vitality gestures and embodied diagrammatics.
Key words: aesthetic episteme; attention; embodied diagrammatics; figure; figuring; notation; practice-as-research; praxis; prenoetic; vitality gestures

During this phase of the lab I will be working with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil alongside Lilia Mestre and Werner Mobius, to further develop the vocabulary around Radical Scores of Attention initiated in the Summer Method Lab. We will be presenting some of our work in progress on Saturday 12th December at Tanzquartier, from 1700 - 1900.



Event: Open Studios






21 – 22 November 11.00 – 16.00, Open Studios at Exchange Place - presenting my own writing about, in parallel to and as art practice. Examples above including 'Re-Writing' in RITE, 'Close Reading' in The Other Room Anthology, 'Seeing Shadows' in Seers-in-Residence, '[...]' in Beginnings, 'Infinite' in Everything is so  Infinite, 'Room for Manoeuvre, or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins', in Manual for Marginal Places. Artists' books additionally presented included Performing the City, The Italic I, Manual, Open City. This annual event provided an opportunity for reflecting on different tactics of writing operating in my own practice: serial forms of prose-poetry written in dialogue with others' practice, conversation-as-material - collaborative dialogue distilled into poetic fragments, 'close reading' - acts of looking at language close up through visual magnification, performance and performative writing, strategies of listing, extraction and appropriation, scripts and scores.

Article: The Meletē of Live Coding


My proposed article ‘Performing Thinking in Action: The Meletē of Live Coding’ has been selected for development as a full paper for the forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media (Issue 12.2, October 2016), on the topic of Live Coding in Performance Arts.

 A PDF of the article can be downloaded here.

Abstract: Performing Thinking in Action: The Meletē of Live Coding
This article will address live coding both as a dynamic model of ‘performing thinking’ in action, and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’. Underpinned by the principle of performing its thinking through ‘showing the screen’, live coding involves ‘making visible’ the process of its own unfolding through the public sharing of live decision-making within improvisatory performance practice. To expose the inner workings of practice foregrounds process, emphasizing the methods and mechanics of production, the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening (live). Moreover, the making visible of thinking ‘in action’ has epistemological import, shedding light on the nature of knowledge production and mode of intelligence operative therein, generating insights into this habitually unseen or unshared aspect of creative endeavour. Live coding is arguably a hybrid - even liminal - practice, operating at the critical interstice between different disciplines, oscillating between a problem-solving modality and a problematizing, questioning, even obstacle-generating tendency. Demonstrating a multi-modal model of ‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ emerging between the lines of musical-rhythmic, linguistic-verbal, spatial-visual and numerical-logical intelligences, live coding has capacity to offer insight into the commonalities and potential for complementarity between ways of knowing emerging from the sciences and arts.

Live coding can also be conceived as the performing of ‘thinking in action’, a live and embodied navigation of various critical thresholds, affordances and restraints, where its thinking-knowing cannot be easily transmitted nor is it strictly a latent knowledge or ‘know how’ activated through action. Live coding is arguably performed in actu, where in Alan Pottage’s terms, its power “exists only en acte, or in actu, (which) is to say … that is ‘is’ only in the process of its exercise”.[i] I propose to explore live coding as a performative exercise in ‘thinking in action’, for the live navigation or negotiation of certain concepts and conditions, thresholds and limits: for working with elective rules/restraints as critical leverage; for testing the relation between receptivity and spontaneity, between the embodied and intuitive, between an immersive flow experience and split-attention, between human and machine, the known and not yet known. Moreover, live coding emerges as an experimental site for reflecting on different perceptions and possibilities of temporal experience within live performance: for attending to the threshold between the live and mediated, between present and future-present, proposing even towards a quality of atemporality or even aliveness, the temporary suspension of chronos. Against the privileging of real-time performance – and narrowing of the feedback loop between intention and execution – I advocate critical value for the gaps and lags within live coding performance as reflective intervals for building the capacity for biding one’s time and knowing when to act, for the kairotic practice of intervention and ‘invention in the middle’.[ii] Drawing on the Ancient Greek concepts of techne, kairos (opportune timing) and metis (cunning intelligence), I conceptualise live coding as a contemporary exercise (askesis) for performing thinking-in-action (a meletē - meditation or ‘thought experiment’), for practicing the human qualities of attention, cognitive agility and tactical intelligence, for cultivating a more critical mode of human agency and subjectivity.

About the issue
Live coding has grown as a performance method over the past decade, infiltrating diverse art forms, but with strong grounding in musical and audiovisual performance. Following a decade of music releases, festivals, journal issues, symposia, and conference tracks, with online hubs like TOPLAP and the AHRC funded Live Coding Research Network supporting both artistic and research activities within the field, the first International Conference on Live Coding will take place at the University of Leeds in July 2015. This journal issue aims to explore the new possibilities offered to artistic performance by live coding, and whether the algorithmic approach to dynamic thought and action which underlies live coding practice can shed light on aspects of more traditional approaches in the performing arts. Live coding is essentially the act of creating and modifying symbolic instructions in real-time, encompassing historical and contemporary work that goes beyond computer-based systems to include practices in improvisation, choreography, literature, live/performance art, visual arts, and theatre. The issue will explore pertinent questions of liveness and what rule-based instruction formats, such as live coding, live scoring, or live notation, offer to the performance arts; engaging with the physicality of performance, embodiment, considerations of space, machines, audience, and perceptions of the flow of time.


[i]                  Alain Pottage, ‘Power as an art of contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze, Foucault’ in Economy and Society, Volume 27, Issue 1, 1998, p.22.
[ii]                 Debra Hawhee, ‘Kairotic Encounters’, in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, (eds.) Janet Atwill and Janice M. Lauer, (University of Tennessee Press, 2002), p.18.


Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)