Over the last couple of years, I have been working with artist Rose Butler to develop a collaborative
artists’ bookwork which is published this week.
We are told that there is no outside, that to make one’s resistance visible exposes it to control. Still, ways to resist must persist, for the imagining of a future otherwise. Pro-test then — test the system to its limits through the advance of experimental means; cultivate one’s disobedience as an aesthetic practice. Towards a resistant poetics of reorientation — tilt of experience on its axis such that it can be thought anew; radical reorganisation of attention above and beyond the conditions of surveillance and subjugation.
Above and Beyond is a dialogue between artist Rose Butler
and writer-artist Emma Cocker reflecting on the interplay between surveillance
and resistance; how technologies and techniques of capture might be subverted,
transformed into experimental tactics of protest and dissent. The publication
was developed through a process of conversation between Butler and Cocker
taking place over a number of years (2015—2018), a period marked by substantial
political shifts and humanitarian crisis, an unprecedented increase in
surveillance and security control.
This collaborative artists’ publication is conceived in response to Come and Go (see stills above), a dual screen interactive artwork by Rose Butler that takes Edison’s early films of the Serpentine Dance as its reference with the dance phrases filmed from above.
This collaborative artists’ publication is conceived in response to Come and Go (see stills above), a dual screen interactive artwork by Rose Butler that takes Edison’s early films of the Serpentine Dance as its reference with the dance phrases filmed from above.
Images . . . . . . . . .
. . . . Rose Butler
Text . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Emma Cocker
Choreographer . . . . .
Alexander Whitley
Dancer . . . . . . . . .
. . . . Natalie Allen
Design . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . Joff and Ollie