Conference: Alliances and Commonalities

I will be participating in the forthcoming conference, Alliances and Commonalities, hosted by Stockholm University of the Arts (20–22 October, 2022). We - myself, Alex Arteaga and Nicole Wendel - will be activating an "ecology of aesthetic research practices" in relation to our ongoing research collaboration, thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices. More on our project here. 

 

Our Proposal: Through live activation of an ecology of aesthetic research practices, the aim is to provide the conditions for acquiring evidence of a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking. The performed aesthetic research practices are not presented as illustrative examples but rather as ongoing processes of research, as aesthetic thinking in action. To practice and to reflect aesthetic thinking through aesthetic thinking contributes to destabilize the hegemonic epistemic paradigms and, furthermore, epistemology as theoretical framework. We understand these processes as a contribution to disclose new forms of transformative understanding in order to approach the current collective crises in more skillful ways.

 

Conference profile area: We will be presenting within the frame of the "Art, Technology, Materiality" profile area. This profile area takes as it starting point that humans are connected to the world and to each other through material entanglements and invites an exploration of these relationships.

- Material thinking: The profile area serves as a context for questioning the nature of the materiality of artistic practice and its implications. It enables discussions on what occurs in and through artistic practice, in the interplay between making and thinking where knowledge and meaning is acquired through engaging in the world, with other beings as well as through materials and things. Here, objects are considered active and co-creating rather than discovered or revealed.

- Performativity: Materials and technological devices are interrogated in relation to this interplay between making and thinking, according to what they do, how they form significant interconnections. Ongoing research is in particular interested in how cameras and other devices activate particular kinds of networks. It explores how technical devices enable forms of conversations with both material entities, place, and other agents, and how they enable relevant forms of inquiry. Technological devices are considered as tools for engagement, imaginative tools that connects the known and the unimaginable, activate relationships between here and there, then and now.

- Unstable processes: This profile area addresses the artistic development of technological and material processes, and technological extensions or material challenges to existing artistic practices. It activates a framework of projects, experiments and discourses that explores artistic practice as a way of bringing elements into relationship with each other and that critically engages with the material and technical conditions involved.

- Ecological entanglement: This profile area invites reflection and research from a perspective on the world where the human is not always the privileged position. Considering interconnections with and between material matter enables and requires a reconsideration of how humans are connected in the world as well as of the concept of nature and the impact of technology in society.

 

See the full programme and register here

 

 

Research Dialogue: Choreo-ethical Assemblages

Image: Mariella Greil, Choreo-ethical Assemblages

Between 26 - 29 September 2022, I was working as a "dialogue partner" with Mariella Greil at APL (Angewandte Performance Laboratory, Vienna) as part of her artistic research project, Choreo-ethical Assemblages – Narrations of Bare Bodies. 

Choreo-ethical Assemblages – Narrations of Bare Bodies is a research project led by Mariella Greil, in dialogue with international specialists from the fields of Performance, Philosophy and Therapy. With ‘practice as research’ at its heart, Choreo-ethical Assemblages – Narrations of Bare Bodies stages a variety of choreo-ethical, inter-subjective and transdisciplinary encounters and explores the movements, interlinkings and interstices between practice and theory, developing fluency between thinking and doing [...] In expanded time frames dedicated to studio-experiments, an awareness and the skill to sustain inter-relational, choreo-ethical culture grow based on experiences and acts interwoven with dialogic discourse. More on Mariella's project Choreo-ethical Assemblages here. 

Publication: Live Coding - A User's Manual

Live Coding: A User’s Manual (MIT, 2022) is the first comprehensive introduction to the origins, aspirations, and evolution of live coding, that I have co-authored with Alan Blackwell (Professor of Interdisciplinary Design at the University of Cambridge); Geoff Cox (Professor of Art and Computational Culture and Codirector of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University); Alex McLean (Research Fellow of the Then Try This independent research studio and instigator of the TidalCycles software and Algorave movement); and Thor Magnusson (Professor in Future Music at the University of Sussex and Research Professor at the Iceland University of the Arts).

 

Performative, improvised, on the fly: live coding is about how people interact with the world and each other via code. In the last few decades, live coding has emerged as a dynamic creative practice gaining attention across cultural and technical fields—from music and the visual arts through to computer science. Live Coding: A User’s Manual is the first comprehensive introduction to the practice, and a broader cultural commentary on the potential for live coding to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. This multi-authored book—by artists and musicians, software designers, and researchers—provides a practice-focused account of the origins, aspirations, and evolution of live coding, including expositions from a wide range of live coding practitioners. In a more conceptual register, the authors consider liveness, temporality, and knowledge in relation to live coding, alongside speculating on the practice’s future forms.

Live Coding: A User’s Manual will be published in November 2022. More here.

Publication: Walking from Scores

I am delighted that my postcard 'score' developed in collaboration with Open City, is appearing between contributions from Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik in this new anthology, Walking from Scores. More here.

 

Walking from Scores is an anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental music and performance, gathered and presented by Elena Biserna.

 

Walking from Scores is a hundred or so collection of non site-specific protocols, instructions and textual and graphic scores centred on walking, listening and playing sound in urban environment. It explores the relationship between art and the everyday, the dynamics of sound and listening in various environments and the (porous) frontiers between artists and audiences. It starts with two premises: an interest in walking envisaged as a relational practice and tactic enabling us to read and rewrite space; an interpretation of scores understood as open invitations and catalysers of action in the tradition of Fluxus event scores.

With scores and texts by Peter Ablinger, Milan Adamčiak, G. Douglas Barrett, Elena Biserna, Blank Noise, George Brecht, Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Chase, Giuseppe Chiari, Seth Cluett, Philip Corner, Viv Corringham, Bill Dietz, Amy Dignam, David Dunn, Haytham El-Wardany, Esther Ferrer, Simone Forti Francesco Gagliardi, Jérôme Giller, Oliver Ginger, Anna & Lawrence Halprin, David Helbich, Dick Higgins, Christopher Hobbs, Jérôme Joy, katrinem, Debbie Kent, Bengt af Klintberg, James Klopfleisch, Milan Knížák, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Jirí Kovanda, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bob Lens, Ligia Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Larry Miller, iLAND/Jennifer Monson, Max Neuhaus, Alisa Oleva, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Open City & Emma Cocker, Nam June Paik, Michael Parsons, Ben Patterson, Cesare Pietroiusti, Mathias Poisson, Anna Raimondo, Pheobe riley Law, Jez riley French, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Mark So, Standards, Nicolas Tardy, Davide Tidoni, Ultra-red, Isolde Venrooy, Carole Weber, Manfred Werder, Franziska Windisch, Ben Vautier, La Monte Young.

Symposium: Contingent Agencies

In September, I am in Vienna participating in the Contingent Agencies symposium. More here.

Contingent Agencies is an artistic research project conceived as an inquiry into atmospheres― the subtle, dynamic, complex, and enveloping presences that emerge in given situations for those who inhabit them. More particularly, this project investigates the specific ways in which the agencies of single components of a situation (from light to animals, artifacts to sounds, matter to vegetation, traffic to color …) condition the emergence of these all-over and senseful presences.
 
In this concluding symposium, a cross-disciplinary group of researchers will address this complex subject matter as well as the specific research methodology developed in this project, based on practices of notation and reflection in diverse media. Participant researchers will be Karen Barad, Arno Boehler, Emma Cocker, Gerhard Dirmoser, Mika Elo, Tim Ingold, Sabina Holzer, Paula Kramer, Lambros Malafouris, Erin Manning, Dieter Mersch, Hans Jörg Rheinberger, and Andreas Spiegl, together with the principal investigators Nikolaus Gansterer and Alex Arteaga and the head of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung Alexander Damianisch.
 
Agencies and atmospheres will be inquired from a multi-perspective approach with contributions from artistic research (somatics, choreography, drawing, sound, video, photography, language-based practices) philosophy, archeology, anthropology and physics.
 
This symposium is conceived as an intensive research week articulated in two interconnected parts—a series of public lectures, panel discussions (both accessible onsite and online), and public showings, and an internal program comprising micro workshops and practice sessions.
 
Internal program:
This symposium is articulated in two interconnected parts – a series of public lectures, panel discussions and public showings (see program above) and an internal program of micro workshops and practice sessions. From Monday September 19 to Saturday September 24 a core group of guest researchers (Arno Boehler, Emma Cocker, Mika Elo, Sabina Holzer, Paula Kramer and Andreas Spiegl) together with the key researchers Nikolaus Gansterer and Alex Arteaga will perform different practices of notation and reflection and experiment and implement various tactics of showing and sharing.  Furthermore, together with guest researchers Gerhard Dirmoser, Dieter Mersch, Hans Jörg Rheinberger the whole group will discuss the conceptual framework of the project. The results of these internal working sessions will be presented in the public assemblies.

Venue
Zentrum Fokus Forschung
Rustenschacherallee 2–4
1020 Vienna, Austria

Project: Weather Words

Initiated by Julieanna Preston, Word Weathers is an interactive durational writing performance that considers the radical nature of now-ness as a temporal state of atmospheric contingency bound by location, observation and critical reflection on the state of a biosphere in crisis. Over the course of 24 hours, a full rotation of the earth, on 21 June 2022 – the Winter/Summer solstice – we collaborate, write, read, image, sound, respond, edit, augment and supplement a single continuous text and mark-making performance visible to all event participants. This online performance writing exchange will include others situated around the globe to participate as guests to watch and record their weather. Our collective efforts will be to become weather: to mark the moment of transition from navigational, geographical and meteorological thought and the emergence of an extended dawn around the globe.

Participating Weather Artist-Writers
Tru Paraha (Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland); Ana Iti (Ōtautahi Christchurch); Azza Zein (Melbourne); Jordan Lacey (Melbourne); Melody Woodnutt (Melbourne); Jo Pollitt (Boorloo/Perth); Moza Almatrooshi (Sharjah); Sree (Abu Dhabi); Alina Tiphagne (New Delhi); Indrajan Banerjee (New Delhi); Muay Parivudhiphongs (Bangkok); Anna Kazumi-Stahl (Buenos Aires); Felipe Cervera (Singapore); Mary Ann Josette Pernia (Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila); Ysabelle Cheung (Hong Kong); Yang Yeung (Hong Kong); Peter Goche (Ames); Klara du Plessis (Montreal); Emma Telaro (Montreal); Việt Lê (San Francisco); Iwonka Piotrowska (Bar Harbour, Maine); Lin Snelling (Toronto); Molly Samsell (Sante Fe); Sans Soleil (Lima); Janine Eisenächer (Berlin); Anthony Kroytor and Jia Qian Yu (Vienna); P. A. Skantze (Italy); Katja Hilevaara (London); Daphne Dragona (Athens); Kris Pint (Diest); Maria Gil Ulldemolins (Brussels); Emma Cocker (Sheffield); Polly Gould (Newcastle); Felicia Konrad (Mälmo); Paula Toppila (Helsinki).

See more here: 

Research workshop: Tender Dialogues

Tender Dialogues: Suspending Artistic Research Writing as Meaning-Making

Initiated by Emma Cocker and Lena Séraphin, Tender Dialogues was a 3-hour workshop which took place on 2 July 2022 activated within the frame of the 13th Society of Artistic Research Conference (Mend, Blend, Attend) held at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
 
The proposition for the workshop was to critically assess artistic research writing as meaning-making and suggests suspension of end results in favour of collaborative thought processes. The Tender Dialogues workshop is inspired by the writings of Georges Perec and his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris that acknowledges overlooked phenomena in a Parisian square in 1974. The aim is to further develop Perec’s writing experiment by collectively making a non-conclusive inventory of public space, rather than referencing the book. The workshop devices observational writing on civic space. It consists of conversations, readings and writings that challenge language as representation. A procedural approach disentangles writing from singular perspectives and suspends writing from meaning making by an epistemic inquiry that advances open-minded dialogue. The writing bridges the corporeal and cerebral and arrives at circumventing isolated objects and thus lacks control of semantic appearances.
 
In this 180min workshop, we will together test writing in public space beginning with a prompt outlining the role of a sole writer by noting singular words about phenomena in our field of vision. From there we continue to write as a group, a collective that decides on a spatial score for the writers on site, and the observational writing is tested on behalf of bodily perception and sensation. The third prompt continues to be based on bodily awareness, but the writers now move and write simultaneously in a pattern that is collectively decided on. This third writing prompt rejects naming and nouns and is inspired by quantum theory. Each of the three writing sessions is merged with readings and discussions about the experiences of writing and the diverse textual qualities buoyed by a procedural approach. The prompts demonstrate how writing has capacities for forming affinities, how writing can be a collective attempt and therefore attend to reflective collaboration.

More here.

Event: Gathering of Language-based Artistic Research

Image: from A_Collective_”I” 

In July we – Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin - were in Weimar, Germany, introducing the activities of the Special Interest Group of Language-based Artistic Research as part of the Society of Artistic Research Conference 2022 [ Weimar, Germany, Friday 1 July 2022, 14.30 - 15.50 CET, Bauhaus-Universität, Marienstraße 13 c, 99423 Weimar]

In this first in-person meeting since 2019, we continued to explore the questions: How is language-based artistic research? How to enable connections and affinities between researchers? How to establish shared frames of reference? Since 2019, this Language-based Artistic Research Special Interest Group has evolved through various activities including Practice Sharing (2020), a gathering of over 70 online examples of language-based practices from diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography and literature; and Affinities and Urgencies (2021/22), two online events that comprised sessions facilitated by different groups or individuals identifying constellations of interest and focus within this expanding field of research practice. This live and in-person session during the SAR conference continued along these lines moving towards a more distributed organisation of the Special Interest Group. We shared recent activities, introduce ‘thematic nodes’ and engaged with a wider community of artistic researchers, including a second call for ‘Practice Sharing’. 
 
With introductions to emergent thematic nodes in proposed running order of presentation:
 
- A_Collective_”I”
Daisy Hildyard | Katrin Hahner | Rosie Heinrich| Sepideh Karami
- Collective writing in public space
Initiated by Lena Séraphin with Emma Cocker | Andrea Coyotzi Borja| Cordula Daus | Vidha Saumya
- The un|common ground
Regina Dürig | Marinos Koutsomichalis | Phoenix Savage,| Anna T
- Articulating Solitudes
Steve Dutton | Adelheid Mers
- Words as Matter
Mariana Renthel | Anouk Hoogendoorn
- Writing as research as writing
Marjolijn van den Berg | Nirav Christophe | Daniela Moosmann | Ninke Overbeek
- Unspeakable Dialogues: Narratives for the Anthropocene
Rachel Armstrong | Breg Horemans | Rolf Hughes | Virginia Tassinari
 
See recorded presentations here 

Symposium: Sentient Performativities

In June, Katrina Brown and I shared aspects of our research collaboration Dorsal Practices within the frame of Sentient Performativities: Thinking Alongside the Human (Dartington, UK, 26 – 30 June 2022).
 
Image: Screen grabs from zoom conversations (back to back)

Dorsal Practices is an interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as sentient bodies orientate to self, others (human, more than human) and interconnected world. Brown and Cocker’s practical workshop aims to open and share their collaborative research process with attendees, drawing on the dialogue between the two researchers’ distinct expertise as a choreographer and as a writer-artist, by combining body-based, somatic-informed exercises with conversation-based practices and embodied deep listening. Through practice-based exploration this workshop explores: What emerges through a shift of attention away from frontality, verticality, even visuality, towards increased awareness of dorsality, diagonality and listening? How do we nurture radical receptivity towards the experience of not knowing and towards ‘otherness’ within dorsal practices? What new approaches emerge in the intermingling of movement-based ways of feeling-thinking-knowing, and language-based artistic research? Working with simple movement scores [activating touch, peripheral vision, what is glimpsed in the corner of the eye, back-to-back conversation], the workshop will explore axial and surface technologies of the back from a felt perspective, alongside the poetic and philosophical concepts of the dorsal that arise from this working-with and together.
 
Dorsal Practices – Performance Reading
Dorsal Practices is an interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as sentient bodies orientate to self, others (human, more than human) and interconnected world. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open, receptive ethics of relation? Allowing, accepting, letting — a back-oriented approach to sense-making involves receptivity to the unknown, to that which remains behind, beneath, below habitual registers of meaning. It foregrounds the active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. How are experiences of moving, listening, voicing, even agency, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back? How can this tilt — this inclination — towards a receptive mode of dorsal (dis)orientation enable new modes of thinking, perceiving and being-with, nurture more connected and sustainable ways of living and of aliveness, based on the reciprocal and entangled relationship between self and environment? Since January 2021, Brown + Cocker have investigated the physical experience of a dorsal orientation through movement exercises, accompanied by a process of conversation on ZOOM reflecting with-and-through the embodied experiences of physical practice. Often undertaken back-to-back (subverting online habits of faciality) the conversations fostered sensitive interaction, heightening attention to the experience of listening and being listened to, allowing for an emergent “dorsal voicing”. This performance reading reactivates the conversation transcripts generated within this process, through an improvised experimental reading, through the intersubjective blending of two voices within the occasionality of dialogic encounter.

More on Dorsal Practices here.
 
About Sentient Performativities
Sentient Performativities investigates somatic (ie bodily) practices and their role in fostering ecological awareness and interspecies communication. In short, this is about how we feel the world rather than how we think about it. This broad reach into somatic-informed practices seems increasingly essential in view of the growing schism between the human and natural worlds. We invite you to articulate how you viscerally experience the agency of all living things. Reflecting on the emergence of new practices we are interested to both highlight as well as de-centre somatic work from dance and movement disciplines to see how a somatic approach is reaching into other practices. We invite you to explore with us new embodied dialogues between disciplines, opening up as well as defining boundaries, questioning and learning how somatic-informed practices can offer more intimacy in relating to ourselves and to other species, and looking at how this can inform new practices and modes of relationship at large. This symposium seeks delicate antidotes to an increasing dis-embodiment and apathy towards the aliveness of the more than human world and wishes to revoke the prevailing operating system based on dead matter. We propose that eco-somatic practices can contribute towards the cultivation of sensorial capacities that assist our awareness of how we co-evolve within expressive ecologies and that what happens to our environments is inevitably and inexorably happening to us. More here. 
 

Research project/collaboration: Textorium

Photographs: Christoffer Björklund 2022

In June 2022, I was working in Vasa, Finland, on a research collaboration, Textorium, for exploring way of site-specific writing and reading in public space. Textorium is an experiment in collective writing in/on/with public space initiated by Lena Séraphin, with artist-writers Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus and Vidha Saumya. Between 30 May – 4 June 2022, this group of artist-writers met in Vasa, Finland, coming together over a period of days to write in/on/from the Market Square. This exposition gathers scores, documents and artefacts generated through a specific time-bound process of collective writing in this singular public space.

Inspired by the writings of Georges Perec and his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris that acknowledges overlooked phenomena in a Parisian square in 1974, the project Textorium attends to Vasa’s Market Square as an ever-changing phenomenon, writing and rewriting it through the lens of different prompts and scores. In one sense, the project explores ways for intervening in, disrupting or unsettling the homogeneity of civic consumerism and the commercialisation of urban common space, through the gentle act of focused attention and through languaging the space otherwise.

 

This collaborative project conceives writing, reading and listening as aesthetic research practices, caring for their inter-subjective potential, whilst asking how shared spaces are constructed in/by/with text. Textorium invites a multitude of intertwining writerly perspectives through observational writing underpinned by bodily awareness, perception and sensations. The performativity of this practice redefines the solitary act of writing, introducing collective live-writing in public space as an artistic-literary genre.

 

For phenomenologist, Max van Manen, the term textorium refers to a “virtual space that the words open up […] The physical space of reading or writing allows me to pass through it into the world opened up by the words, the space of the text”. Struck by his account of the textorium and the ‘virtual space’ that opens for the writer-reader, we wondered how our experimental practices might generate insights into the experiential textorium of collective writing? What worlds become “opened up by the words”, by “the space of the text”? What other ways for perceiving and reimagining public space emerge in and through language? In turn, how does writing in a public space shape and inform the emergent possibilities of language, alongside the felt sense of subjectivity for both writers and readers?

For more on this project see here.

Research: Performing Process

PERFORMING PROCESS is an emergent research group within the Artistic Research Centre at Nottingham Trent University, co-led by Emma Cocker and Danica Maier, both Associate Professors in Fine Art.  We ask: what is at stake in focusing on the process of practice — the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing. What is the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within artistic research? How might a process-focused exploration intervene in and offer new perspectives on artistic practice and research, perhaps even on the uncertain conditions of contemporary life?

 

In Spring 2022, we launched this research group with a series of reading groups/discussions focusing on a number of thematic nodes including SLOW PRACTICES; AUTOTELIC – TOWARDS FLOW; MODES OF ATTENTION; EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE(S); OTHER KNOWING(S); EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY.

 

PERFORMING PROCESS has origins in a number of critical precedents: Summer and Winter Lodges originating within the fine art area (practice-research residencies or laboratories dedicated to providing space-time for making-thinking and for exploring the process of practice), collaborative artistic research projects such as No Telos, for exploring the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity; the DREAM seminar series with PhD researchers which focuses specifically on the ‘how-ness’ of practice research by asking - How do we do what we do?

 

See here for the website for this research thematic (in progress)

Seminars: SENSE + Writing as Artistic Research

From 7 - 12 March 2022, I was an invited by Mika Elo (Professor of Artistic Research and the Head of the Doctoral program in Fine Arts) as a guest contributor to a week-long PhD intensive at UniArts, Helsinki. My programme of activity included 8.2.2022: Invited by Annette Arlander (Professor in performance, art and theory) and Mika Elo (professor of artistic research and the head of the doctoral program in fine arts) as guest contributor to the seminar series Artistic Research Concepts and Contexts, to focus the session on my own contribution to the field of Artistic Research writing; 9.2.2022: Invited by Leena Rouhiainen (Vice Dean (Research), Head of Performing Arts Research Centre, Professor in Artistic Research) to give a lecture/seminar on Writing as Artistic Research; 11.3.2022: invited by Mika Elo, to co-lead a day-long seminar on “Sense” within artistic research, focusing on my research on 'reading as an aesthetic practice'; 12.3.2022: invited by Maiju Loukola to contribute to a seminar related to the ongoing Kone Foundation (2021-2024) funded project 'The City as a Space of Rules and Dreaming'.

Publication: Creativity

The transcript from a panel discussion Creativity And The Artist, with Jessica Ball,  Alison Churchill, Emma Cocker and Hester Reeve (that took place on Saturday August 14, 2021 as part of the extended summer seminar series organised by the Pari Centre, Beyond Bohm: Science, Order And Creativity) has been published in Issue Issue 11 of Pari Perspectives which explores the topic of ‘Creativity.'

About this Special Issue of Pari Perspectives

The idea for an issue on Creativity began in August 2021 when the Pari Center hosted an online series of webinars named ‘Beyond Bohm.’ In Part 2 of this series, ‘Contemplation and Creativity,’ the non-scientific aspects of David Bohm’s interests and life’s work were examined and discussed—creativity, consciousness, philosophy, imagination, dialogue, indigenous wisdom, language, art, and education. A number of the presenters have kindly allowed us to use their talks, transcribed for this issue. In addition, we have included excerpts from a talk that Bohm delivered before the London Architectural Association in 1967. The complete talk now appears as the title essay in his book On Creativity, Routledge Classics, 2004. More about Pari Perspectives here. 

Publication: Hy-phen

‘Like the Lichen, As the Hyphen’ is an essay that draws on my engagement with artist Derek Sprawson’s practice spanning over a decade, from encountering exhibited artwork to witnessing studio experiments in formation, alongside ongoing conversations around shared interests and ideas. The text is for a new publication on Derek’s work, and in a sense, is conceived as a collaboration. Published in Derek Sprawson: Hy-phen, Paintings – Drawings – Objects (Beam Editions, Nottingham, 2022). Buy publication here: 

Extract

The artist might begin from where they left off — an existing work or experiment in progress — repeating and modifying a given action or approach until exhaustion. Here, exhaustive repetition is not for the betterment of technique or application, rather a way of tiring out the tried-and-tested such that something else might then emerge, some inconsistency, anomaly or mutation. A habit is fatigued so as to release its hold, weakened or disempowered through the gesture of doing and redoing. Such a practice requires patience, the forbearance to stick at something, see it through. The artist must remain vigilant, mindful not to let the habit reinstall, alert to the possibility of both the unpredicted and unpredictable. The artist cannot make this happen, the process cannot be forced. The quality of attention is of an unthinking thoughtfulness or of thoughtful unthinking — receptive awareness capable of recognising the unrecognisable, of witnessing the un-thought […]

 

Anticipating the unknown or unforeseen is not like waiting for the arrival of one’s muse nor for divine inspiration. Beyond what the artist knows emerges from within the event of making rather than external to it, immanent to the process rather than necessarily coming from without. The artist collaborates with the unfolding work, sometimes leading in the process, at other times willing to be led. Whilst truth to materials involves using a material appropriately, without hiding or concealing its nature, the artist’s fidelity to materials comes closer to communion, an experience of shared participation or coming together within and through practice. Edging beyond what one already knows can involve leaning back, letting go of forethought plan or aim. The artist must loosen or lessen their intention, so as to fully intend. Intend: from intendre, to give attention, pay heed or else to hear. The artist listens to the emerging work, tending to what it wants. Hold backs, becomes a little shy. Here, shy is not timid nor afraid, suspicious or distrustful. Shyness is felt as heightened sensitivity to the affective experience of a relational encounter, increased susceptibility to the potential for awkwardness or even perplexity therein. So often the reflex habit of shy is that of shrinking, withdrawal from interactions or situations likely to cause discomfort or unease. The blush of shyness blooms as a line is crossed, a norm transgressed, control lost, in a moment of not knowing. A radical shyness feels the hot rise of embarrassment or of being caught off-guard, then turns towards that experience rather than turning away. Shyness embraced creates the conditions of voluntary vulnerability — through shyness an expanded state of openness, neither withholding nor closed off. Alternatively, the artist’s shyness is bashful — holds back and eschews attention such that the work itself has space to breath and become. Abash: to be put into confusion by wonder, admiration or by fear; to perplex or embarrass; to open wide or gape. To diminish or lower oneself: lose one’s self-possession. The artist lowers or lets go the willed force of their own I, enabling the practice to become truly co-constitutive, a co-emergent process of becoming involving mutual transformation of both the material and the artist.