Symposium: Doing Deceleration

Doing Deceleration

The Space, Nottingham Contemporary

Tuesday 4 July, 2017

10am-1pm

The imperative to ‘do deceleration’ is less a call to ‘slow down’, to withdraw or retreat from the process of production as such. Instead, the invitation is to explore ways in which we might disrupt or dislodge the pressure of acceleration: the ubiquitous demands to do more and more – faster and faster – that arguably underpin our contemporary culture of immediacy and urgency,of 24/7 access and availability, with its privileging ofmultitasking, perpetual readiness and ethos of ‘just-in-time’ production. In one sense, the requirement to do more and more can result in a reality of less and less, the cultivation of superficial engagement overriding the possibility of deep, sustained immersion; diminishing the potential of attention and concentration. How does the art school or even the artists’ studio respond to or alternatively refuse these cultural tendencies? How might the space-time of the studio or residency provide an alternative model for practice, perhaps even offer the conditions of resistance? Less the reactive manifestation ofchrono-phobic anxiety, how might doing deceleration reveal rest and reflection as active components of artistic production, the practice of doing-nothing as complementary rather than oppositional to action? Here, radical deceleration does not involve the retreat towards the promise of a singular (slower) temporality, but rather has the capacity to reveal and bring into relation a plurality of micro-temporal co-incidings. Speakers include: Henk Slager, Mick Wilson, Adrian Heathfield, Finn Janning and Danica Maier. Chaired by Emma Cocker.

Ane Hjort Guttu, Time Passes (still), 2015

Doing Deceleration is a partnership between Nottingham Trent University ‘Summer Lodge’ and Nottingham Contemporary, programmed in conjunction with Exhausted Academies, an exhibition project curated by Visiting Professor Henk Slager (Nottingham Contemporary, 30 June – 5 July 2017). Exhausted Academies asks how might we rethink the relation between artistic research and the art academy, specifically through a critique of the ‘exhausting’ achievement-oriented and instrumentalised tendencies of the contemporary neoliberal institution, and a return to a ‘verticalist’ perspective that ‘makes space’ for attention and concentration; for experiment, novel questions and speculation; for reflexivity, new modes of imagination; for an open-ended form of differential thinking that values not-knowing, the singular, the affective, the transgressive, and the unforeseen.

Journal Article: Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos

My journal article ‘Weaving Codes / Coding Weaves: PenelopeanMêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos’ is now published in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Vol.15, Issue 2

A PDF of the article can be downloaded here.

Abstract: Drawing on my experience as ‘critical interlocutor’ within the research project Weaving Codes / Coding Weaves, in this article I reflect on the human qualities of attention, cognitive agility and tactical intelligence activated within live coding and ancient weaving with reference to the Ancient Greek concepts of technē, kairos and mêtis. The article explores how the specificity of ‘thinking-in-action’ cultivated within improvisatory live coding relates to the embodied ‘thought-in-motion’ activated whilst working on the loom. Echoing the wider concerns of Weaving Codes / Coding Weaves, an attempt is made to redefine the relation between weave and code by dislodging the dominant utilitarian histories that connect computer and the loom, by instead placing emphasis on the potentially resistant and subversive forms of live thinking-and-knowing cultivated therein. I address the Penelopean poetics of both live coding and ancient weaving, proposing how the combination of kairotic timing and timeliness with the mêtic act of ‘doing-undoing-redoing’ therein offers a subversive alternative to – even critique of – certain utilitarian technological developments (within both coding and weaving) which in privileging efficiency and optimization can delimit creative possibilities, reducing the potential of human intervention and invention in the seizing of opportunity, accident, chance and contingency.

Conference Panel: Coming to Writing

Drawing on connections arising within the newly established Critical Poetics research group (see previous post), I will be giving a performative presentation within a panel session entitled Coming to Writing, along with Dr Zayneb Allak and Dr Sarah Jackson, as part of the NTU ‘Critical and Creative’ conference (6 -7 July 2017). Responding to the ‘Critical and Creative’ conference theme, our panel presentation on Critical Poetics brings together current scholarship from English, Creative Writing and Fine Art. Engaging with Hélène Cixous’s Coming to Writing (1991) and other works, Allak, Cocker and Jackson each explore and enact the intersections between creative and critical theory and practice as follows:

Dr Zayneb Allak, Spider Poetics - Writing the Uncanny: What does it mean ‘to spider’? To be sensed, to appear, to stop? To crawl, climb, run up a spine? Hide, escape, shift in shape? Arachnological research shows us that to move in a manner suggestive of a real-life spider means to tiptoe, walk, run, jump, cartwheel, balloon, swim and sail and, of course, to cast a web. In both poetry and prose, this creative/critical paper examines ways in which writing ‘spiders’ into being.

Dr Sarah Jackson, Crossed Lines: Writing and Telephony

By offering us a voice without a body – a voice that is at once at a distance and right inside our heads – the telephone causes a particular kind of interference in thinking and writing. But this destabilizing force is one that we might celebrate rather than avoid, for the effects of telephony lead us to reappraise not simply acts of speaking and listening, but also the means, medium and materiality of the text.

Emma Cocker, Writing without Writing - Conversation as Material

Conversation-as-material involves the quest for a not-yet-known vocabulary emerging synchronous to the situation it seeks to articulate, where meaning does not exist prior to the event of utterance, rather it is discovered (often retrospectively) through a inter-subjective dialogic process; moreover, through the transcription and distillation of recorded conversation towards an emergent, immanent poetics. 

Research group: Critical Poetics

I am part of a new research group at Nottingham Trent University called Critical Poetics, established by Sarah Jackson and Zayneb Allak. Critical Poetics is an interdisciplinary research group that seeks to stimulate debate, collaboration and innovation among scholars and practitioners whose work is concerned with creative and critical theory and practice. It explores possibilities for the text that are engendered by unconventional, unexpected and cross-disciplinary approaches.

“We are at a loss: we don’t know what to call ourselves. The name, ‘Critical Poetics’, approaches our purpose and function, but does not quite encapsulate all that we do. From the Greek ‘poeisis’ meaning ‘to make’, we understand ‘poetics’ as ‘the creative principles informing any literary, social or cultural construction, or the theoretical study of these; a theory of form’ (Oxford English Dictionary). And we understand ‘critical’ as ‘occupied with or skilful in criticism’, and ‘criticism’ as ‘the art of estimating the qualities and character of literary or artistic work’ (OED). But we do not wish only to critique artistic works, or the process of creating these works; rather, we also want to explore the ways in which we can engage with these works, how we can interact and play with them, and how, in that interaction and play, we can create our own texts. How can our criticism be as creative, as dynamic, as innovative and poetic as that which it analyses? And how can our creative works also offer a critical intervention? Are we critics first and artists later, or vice versa, or both at once? Does it help us to focus on the border between the two, or could we simply dismantle it? If our writing is at once creative and critical, and if we are concerned less with division than with unity, what name might we give to what we do?”

Tentative thematics for the Critical Poetics research group include: On Home, On Monsters, On Orbit, On Play, On Spiders, On Tact, On Telephony, On Travel, On the Uncanny, On (Un)ending, On the Unknown, On the Unthinkable.

Project: Kobitadihi... Visual Poetry Anthology

I have been invited by writer, curator and editor Philip Davenport to contribute work to a new international visual poetry anthology, curated by American poet Karl Kempton. The anthology is India's first online visual text art blog, with posts starting to appear online in Spring 2017, and will feature visual text arts such as visual poetry, minimalist poetry, book art, mail art, word painting, contemporary calligraphy, word sculpture, visual text centered collage, visual text centered photography, mathematical poetry and other kindred expressions. Examples of my own work within the anthology will include art-writing comprised of dense prose-poetry paragraphs; a fragmentary poetics produced through ‘close reading’ practised as visual magnification; ‘conversation as material’ - a collaborative approach using distilled transcription for producing an immanent, infrapersonal mode of writing-without-writing; alongside artistic research addressing the knowing-thinking-feeling emerging through the deviation between expanded writing, drawing and choreographic practices.

Publication: Choreo-graphic Figures - Deviations from the Line

With artistic research at its heart, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line  stages a beyond disciplinary, inter-subjective encounter between the lines of choreography, drawing and writing. Its core focus is to explore those forms of thinking-in-action produced through collaborative exchange, in the slippage and deviation when different modes of practice enter into dialogue, overlap, collide.

The publication is conceived as a studio-laboratory in itself, drawing together critical reflections and experimental practices that focus on the how-ness  — the qualitative-processual, aesthetic-epistemological and ethico-empathetic dynamics — within shared artistic exploration, directing attention to an affective realm of forces and intensities existing before, between and beneath the more readable gestures of artistic practice. Cultivating sensitivity towards the barely perceptible micro-movements within the process of artistic ‘sense-making’ has wider structural — even political — implications at the level of the macro, encouraging the de-, re- and trans-figuring of our ways of being in the world, inviting new forms of relationality, sociality and solidarity. Hybrid of an artists’ book and research compendium, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line invokes action by operating as a score  that can be activated by others, providing artists, theorists and creative practitioners with a modular toolkit of performative and notational approaches for future experimental play.

Based on original research and edited by Nikolaus Gansterer, Emma Cocker and Mariella Greil. With contributions by Alex Arteaga, Arno Böhler, Christine De Smedt, Catherine de Zegher, Christopher Dell, Gerhard Dirmoser, Karin Harrasser, Adrian Heathfield, Victor Jaschke, Simona Koch, Krassimira Kruschkova, Brandon LaBelle, Erin Manning, Dieter Mersch, Lilia Mestre, Werner Moebius, Alva Noë, Jeanette Pacher, Jörg Piringer, Helmut Ploebst, P.A. Skantze, Andreas Spiegl

More details on the book here. 

Sample pages here.

Buy the book here. 

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Launch Event: Choreo-graphic Figures

On Friday 5 May 2017, 19:00 – 21:00, we – myself, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil – will be launching our new publication Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line at the AILab Vienna, Austria. The book is available to purchase here.

With artistic research at its heart, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line stages a beyond disciplinary, inter-subjective encounter between the lines of choreography, drawing and writing. Its core focus is to explore those forms of thinking-in-action produced through collaborative exchange, in the slippage and deviation when different modes of practice enter into dialogue, overlap, collide. The publication is conceived as a studio-laboratory in itself, drawing together critical reflections and experimental practices that focus on the how-ness — the qualitative-processual, aesthetic-epistemological and ethico-empathetic dynamics — within shared artistic exploration, directing attention to an affective realm of forces and intensities existing before, between and beneath the more readable gestures of artistic practice. Cultivating sensitivity towards the barely perceptible micro-movements within the process of artistic ‘sense-making’ has wider structural — even political — implications at the level of the macro, encouraging the de-, re- and trans-figuring of our ways of being in the world, inviting new forms of relationality, sociality and solidarity. Hybrid of an artists’ book and research compendium, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line invokes action by operating as a score that can be activated by others, providing artists, theorists and creative practitioners with a modular toolkit of performative and notational approaches for future experimental play.

Based on original research and edited by Nikolaus Gansterer, Emma Cocker and Mariella Greil. With contributions by Alex Arteaga, Arno Böhler, Christine De Smedt, Catherine de Zegher, Christopher Dell, Gerhard Dirmoser, Karin Harrasser, Adrian Heathfield, Victor Jaschke, Simona Koch, Krassimira Kruschkova, Brandon LaBelle, Erin Manning, Dieter Mersch, Lilia Mestre, Werner Moebius, Alva Noë, Jeanette Pacher, Jörg Piringer, Helmut Ploebst, P.A. Skantze, Andreas Spiegl.

Published in the series “Edition Angewandte” by Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, 2017. ISBN 978-3-11-054660-6

Conference: Please Specify!

Together with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil, I will be presenting a performative paper at this year's Society of Artistic Research conference, Please Specify!, taking place in Helsinki, 28 -29 April 2017. The paper, Choreo—graphic Figures: On Qualitative Specificity (How-ness) within Artistic Research, provides reflection on our research project Choreo—graphic Figures: Deviations of the Line, and will be accompanied by the launch of our research publication.  

Abstract: Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line stages a beyond-disciplinary, inter-subjective encounter between the lines of choreography, drawing and writing, for addressing the how-ness — the qualitative-processual, aesthetic-epistemological and ethico-empathetic dynamics — within shared artistic exploration; requiring a thematic shift of attention from the realm of demarcated disciplinary specificity towards an affective realm of forces and intensities (called figuring) operating before, between and beneath the more readable gestures of artistic practice. Our research explores the relation between the experience of figuring and emergence of figures (the point that figuring coalesces into a specific recognisable form). This performative presentation elaborates the qualitative specificity and constitutive conditions for three groups of figures: (1) Elemental Figures — exposition of key moments within the arc of creative endeavour; (2) Empathetic Figures — diagramming of relations and sensitivities of being-with; (3) Transformative Figures — identification of explicit shifts in quality or state of being, blurring the line between activity/passivity, subject/object, self/world.

About the Conference: Artistic research is maturing. The period of inauguration characterized by multi-faceted discussions concerning institutional and disciplinary questions has, in many contexts, reached a saturation point. Diverse perspectives have emerged. Artistic research consists of a variety of approaches and solutions and often functions as a multi- and transdisciplinary venture. As a developing multi-methodological research culture artistic research enriches methodological innovation and cross-over projects. Furthermore, research activities are structured with regard to some kind of specificity. A group of researchers might come together to work on a distinct object of study, through a specific question, with a certain methodology, and in a particular context. Depending on circumstances, specificity thus can appear as a socio-cultural parameter, a disciplinary variable or it can become a question of the medium of research. The Please Specify! Conference explores new perspectives on conditions of sharing research in the artistic field. How can specific interests, methods, discourses, positions and ways of knowing be more widely disseminated and made useful within and beyond artistic research? The traditional frameworks for sharing research have been built on ideas about the research object, method, context or medium. We ask if the conditions of sharing research can be thematised in other terms? What if these conditions relate to provocation, excess, limited resources, reduction, mise en abyme, absurd argumentation, populism, conspiracy, amateurism and the like? How do these or other invented specificities inform your take on artistic research? How can these issues be shared?

Publication in progress: Choreo-graphic Figures

Between 2 – 9 February 2017, I was working at Zentrum Fokus Forschung in Vienna, with Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil and designer Simona Koch, on the final content, layout and graphic design of our forthcoming book, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line. The publication is conceived as a studio-laboratory in itself, drawing together critical reflections and experimental practices that focus on the how-ness — the qualitative-processual, aesthetic-epistemological and ethico-empathetic dynamics — within shared artistic exploration, directing attention to an affective realm of forces and intensities operating before, between and beneath the more readable gestures of artistic practice. Hybrid of an artists-book and research compendium, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line invokes action by operating as a 'score' that can be activated by others, providing artists, theorists and creative practitioners with a modular system of performative and notational tools for future experimental play. More on the publication and related launch events to follow.