Publication: Live coding - a user's manual

I am currently working on a forthcoming publication Live coding - a user's manual (working title), co-authored with Alan Blackwell, Professor, Interdisciplinary Design, University of Cambridge; Geoff Cox, Associate Professor, Department of Aesthetics, Aarhus University; Alex McLean, Research Fellow, Scientific Research in Music, Leeds University; Thor Magnusson, Lecturer in Music, University of Sussex.

Brief Description: Live coding has emerged over the past decade as a dynamic creative practice that has gained attention across cultural and technical fields – from music and the visual arts through to computer science. It is broadly defined as improvised interactive programming, typically but not exclusively to create electronic music or video, and performed live in public. The proposed book, Live coding - a user's manual, is structured as a multi-authored comprehensive introduction to the field of live coding and a broader cultural commentary on its potential to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. The phrase ‘live coding’ - referring to the use of interactive programming languages in performing arts - becomes the starting point for analysis and the overall project of the book; first examining coding practices as live events, and secondly examining the relatively understated question of temporality in coding. In addition to its particular technical and aesthetic qualities, the book argues that the practice of live coding raises wider contemporary concerns, related to the human–machine relation and to conditions of liveness and real-time processes. Indeed it deals centrally with the experience of time, and the various possibilities for change and action that the practice of coding allows. In this sense the book makes the central claim that live coding provides an example of what it means to be ‘operative’ and to be ‘radically present’ in the world.

Conference Paper: Performing Thinking in Action: The Meletē of Live Coding

My paper Performing Thinking in Action:The Meletē of Live Coding has been accepted for inclusion in the forthcoming second International Conference on Live Coding 2016 (ICLC 2016), will take place at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada from October 12th to October 15th, 2016. My paper elaborates ideas which I am developing for an article of the same title for a Special Issue of the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media (Issue 12.2, October 2016), which will focus on Live Coding in Performance Arts. Concerns explored in the paper will also be developed further through my involvement in co-authoring the first book length academic publication addressing Live Coding, Live coding - a user's manual, with Alan Blackwell, Professor, Interdisciplinary Design, University of Cambridge; Geoff Cox, Associate Professor, Department of Aesthetics, Aarhus University; Alex McLean, Research Fellow, Scientific Research in Music, Leeds University; Thor Magnusson, Lecturer in Music, University of Sussex.

Abstract

This paper interprets live coding 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 ‘makes visible’ the process of its own unfolding through the public sharing of live decision-making within improvisatory performance practice, emphasizing the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening (live). 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 aspect of creative endeavour. Live coding can also be conceived as the performing of ‘thinking in action’, a live, embodied navigation of various critical thresholds, affordances and restraints: for working with elective rules/restraints as critical leverage; testing the relation between receptivity and spontaneity, between an immersive flow experience and split-attention, human and machine, the known and not yet known.

Talk: Writing Movement / Reading Movement

Spike Island artist in residence Tamarin Norwood invites dancer and performance artist Martina Conti, writer-artist Emma Cocker and writer and singer Phil Owen to join her in conversation. Building upon insights from their own interdisciplinary methods, they will explore the liveness and 'timeliness' of action and notation across drawing, writing and choreography. This event is part of Point Line Time, a drawing research project led by artist and writer Tamarin Norwood as part of her twelve-month residency at Spike Island, Bristol. Throughout her residency, Norwood is working with a network of researchers and practitioners including an animator, a 3D print engineer, a choreographer and a sign language translator to explore the acts of drawing and writing in relation to time and three-dimensional space. She hosts a series of public conversations, presentations and live experiments as she develops a new body of work. More about the event here.

Exhibition: The Alternative Document

The Alternative Document

project space plus, Lincoln

Curated by Angela Bartram

13 February – 11 March 2016

Artists: Tim Etchells, Jordan McKenzie, Rochelle Haley, David Brazier & Kelda Free, Hector Canonge, Rachel Cherry, Luce Choules, Emma Cocker & Clare Thornton, Kate Corder, Chris Green & Katheryn Owen, Andrew Pepper, Louise K Wilson, Bartram O’Neill. 

About The Alternative Document Exhibition / Text / Publication

Beyond most ephemeral artwork a memory remains in the mind of the observer and this forms part of the legacy of the fleeting event. However, memory is mostly a personal experience, that shifts, mutates, and fades over time to become distant, different to its origin, and in this way its archival potential is unreliable. To overcome this dilemma a variety of lens-based archival methods have become the tradition of recording the ‘actual’ event in as far as it is possible. Although a recorder, of any variation, can provide footage that gives place and context of the archive document, they present a dilemma – how much do they indicate what it was like to ‘be there’. For recordings are mediated and translated for posterity through the direction of the person holding the device and document their viewpoint and subjective encounter with the work. This creates an archival document open to subjective discussion, as a memorial and work in its own right, and of which alternatives are often sought. It is in this way that the disciplinary ghettos of event and documentation are abandoned in favour of a mode of practice that allows for a greater level of mutual critique. For documentation is also subject to the same vagaries of time as the event itself.

Concerned with the ephemeral and how it is perceived Peggy Phelan represents a position on this subject of “you have to be there” in order to understand the ephemeral. Phelan acknowledges that a performance “become[s] itself through disappearance.” This argument draws empathy, but in practice is a less than pragmatic account of the reality of experiencing ephemeral works, for how is the work to exist beyond the moment if not recorded in some way. The symposium seeks to expand on the idea of ephemeral and its loss, and by offering a platform where alternative acts of legacy can be discussed. Hosted by the University of Lincoln the conference will take place in Lincoln Performing Arts Centre on the 13th February 2016. It will run in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the university’s gallery Project Space Plus, which will open on 12^th February 2016.

Publication: A 16 Stage Lexicon on the Arc of Falling

‘The Italic I – A 16 Stage Lexicon on the Arc of Falling’, an article and artists’ pages by Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming special issue of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (TDPT), on Showing and Writing Training, (ed.) Mary Paterson (publication date, 2016).

About the issue: This special issue of TDPT is concerned as much with form as it is with content, interested in the ways that discourse and dialogue about training affect not only training and its stated aims, but also the ways in which these methods and devices are accessed, remembered or reproduced. Questions posed by this issue include: What is the difference between what you do and how you talk about what you do? Who is unwelcome and how do they know? What remains unsaid? What remains undone? What gets undone? Would you say all this to someone you are training with? What kinds of discourses are (in)credible? What have you already assumed? What is impossible to explain?  What can only be known in retrospect? How does it feel? What kind of person is produced by this process and how will they talk? What is (in)substantial? What will change if we do things the same way we talk about them?  What will happen if we don’t? What will change if we don’t change anything that we’re doing right now? What is impossible to articulate in words? What are the secrets of your method? How do you know you belong somewhere? Who do you think you are talking to?

Below is an extract central artists' page from our article, ‘The Italic I – A 16 Stage Lexicon on the Arc of Falling’.

Residency: Choreo-graphic Figures - Embodied Diagrams

CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES - Embodied Diagrams 

Nikolaus Gansterer / Mariella  Greil / Emma Cocker and guests:

29 February - 12 March 2016

This Spring, the artistic research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line by artist-performer Nikolaus Gansterer, choreographer-dancer Mariella Greil and writer-artist Emma Cocker stage an intensive residency laboratory in collaboration with TanzQuartier Wien. In dialogue with a team of international critical interlocutors including Alex Arteaga, Lilia Mestre, Werner Moebius, Jörg Piringer, Christine de Smedt and other guests, this research residency focuses on gesturing with and towards the experience of vitality within the process of live exploration, putting epistemologies, relational processes and the potentials of embodiment through diagrammatic practice under scrutiny. The Spring Lab will be open for the public on 11th March, 2016. All are cordially invited to join on 11th March, 2016, 17:00 - 20:00 for the Spring Lab Opening at the residency laboratory.

Admission free/ Please make a reservation (Max. 20 participants). More about this residency can be found here.

Lecture: Tuesday Talks - Whitworth/MMU

16 February

The Whitworth, Grand Hall

11am – 12.30pm, free, no booking necessary

Tuesday Talks

I have been invited to give a presentation as part of the Tuesday talks series at the Whitworth, Manchester. Tuesday Talks invites leading artists, thinkers and curators to explore the driving forces, influences and sources of inspiration within contemporary art. The Tuesday Talks series are a collaboration between the Whitworth and Manchester Metropolitan University.

Publication - The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice

I have been invited to contribute to the forthcoming publication The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice eds. Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley.

This edited collection brings together a range of examples of how to write about one’s own (art)work in a creative yet academically rigorous way. In a world where practice-as-research is becoming increasingly recognised and valued, artistic-researchers are always looking for ways to discuss and analyse their own work without compromising the creative drive that inspired them in the first place. The collection will comprise of sample writings (which will be introduced and contextualised) by leading researcher-practitioners and emerging artists alike, which will serve as examples for students and independent practitioners interested in writing and thinking about their own work in a creative yet critical, alternative yet theoretically rigorous way.

Writing without Writing: Conversation as Material

My proposed contribution shares and elaborates a method of ‘writing without writing’ that I have developed through a number of practice-based collaborations, where conversation is conceived as both the site and the material for the construction of inter-subjective and immanent modes of linguistic sense-making. I propose to present examples (in the form of artists’ pages) from various collaborative projects, reflecting on the different ways that conversation-as-material functions therein as a means for producing writing as/in dialogue with practice. Conversation-as-material involves the quest for a not-yet-known vocabulary emerging synchronous to the situation it seeks to articulate, formed through the co-production of a language rolled around in the mouth until it starts to yield or give. In this process, meaning does not exist prior to the event of utterance; rather, it is discovered (often retrospectively) through a dialogic process, moreover, through the transcription and distillation of recorded conversation towards an emergent poetics.