I am currently in the process of working on or contributing to various forthcoming publications which will hopefully be in print next year (2024) including: ‘Confluence of Influence, and the Struggle of Differentiation’ a textual artefact and accompanying research exposition in Contingent Agencies (eds.) Alex Arteaga and Nikolaus Gansterer; ‘Liberated from Language: Punctuation’s Performativity in the Absence of Words’ — artists’ pages in Performing Punctuation, (eds.) Julieanna Preston and Anna Brown; ‘Choreo-graphic Writing: Towards More-than-one Means of Inscription’ — a collaborative chapter and research exposition with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil in Writing Choreography: Extending the Conventions of Dance, (eds.) Leena Rouhiainen, Kirsi Heimonen, Rebecca Hilton and Chrysa Parkinson. I am also now in the final stages of working with BEAM Editions on the design for my second collection of creative prose, How Do You Do? More on these various publications soon!
Open Studios
While I often work in collaboration with other artistic researchers on durational projects unfolding over a number of years, where a residency space, site-specific context or even an online environment are approached as a live "laboratory" for shared exploration, my own ongoing studio space is at Exchange Place Studios, Sheffield (part of Yorkshire Artspace). Every year in November, studio-holders are invited to ‘open up’ their studios providing an opportunity for wider publics to explore the studio spaces, meet the artists and find out more about the diversity of creative practices within the city. The studios at @yartspace are opening up on 18 -19 November 2023. My studio will be open on Sunday 19 November 2023, providing the opportunity for me to gather together and share a selection of the publications and artists’ bookworks resulting from my various collaborations, artistic research activities and other writing projects.
Tickets are free and available here:
General booking: https://yorkshireartspace.eventbrite.com/
Exchange Place: https://exchangeplace.eventbrite.com/
Publication: Artistic Research Does #7 - Tactics for Not Knowing
It is a decade since my essay ‘Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected’ was first published in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (Black Dog Publishing, 2013) edited by Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum. The text has just been re-published with a translation into Portuguese, as part of the Artistic Research Does series (published by i2ADS – Institute of Research in Art, Design and Society, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto).
The revised version of ‘Tactics for Not Knowing’ in Artistic Research Does #7 offers two further interventions in the form of annotations. In one column of margin notes, I share additional reflections, referring to some of my more recent artistic research projects and collaborations that continue to resonate with the concerns of the original text. In parallel, a second column of margin notes comprises the titles of additional pieces of contiguous writing drawn from two collections of my creative prose writing, The Yes of the No (2016) and How Do You Do? (2024).
Within the online version of the publication these margin notes include hyperlinks that enable the reader to access these different thought-fragments of writing. See here.
The PDF version can be downloaded here.
The publication was launched on 26 October 2023, along with the release of Derivas, a publication by Doctoral researchers in Art Education. Images from the launch below.
Images: @i2ads 2023
Publication: VIS - Circulating Practices
Textorium: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space is a collaborative article/exposition by Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya, and Lena Séraphin, published in VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Issue 10, Circulating Practices (October 2023).
About the article/exposition:
See exposition here.
Textorium: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space is a language-based artistic research project that explores collaborative score-based approaches to live, situated writing-reading practices, for attending to experiential aspects of situated embodiment with/in public space. Between 30 May—4 June 2022, five artist-writers (Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya and Lena Séraphin) met in Vaasa, Finland, to engage in a process of observational and collective score-based writing-reading with/in public space. With its conceptual anchor in Georges Perec’s short book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975/2010), this enquiry evolves a distinctive approach that foregrounds a corporeal, sensorial and bodily approach to language, where writing and reading are conceived as a collaborative undertaking rather than a solitary endeavour. Working with and through different language-based practices — including performative, poetic, and phenomenology-oriented approaches — the research explores the potentiality of emergent spaces (perhaps even of emergent temporalities, subjectivities and collectivities) produced through the interweaving of shared writing and reading practices, as the cyclical rhythms of writing/reading intermingle with the circulating movements, momentums and flows of public space. Through developing and testing various embodied, corporeal, sensorial, and collaborative approaches, this research enquiry advocates the transformative capacity of language-based artistic research for cultivating new “ecologies of attention” (Yves Citton, 2017). This shared enquiry explores the critical potentiality of our “linguistic bodies” (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher, 2018) as sites of both resistance and affirmation.
About the Issue
See Issue overview here.
VIS issue 10 was published 20 October 2023. The theme is Circulating Practices. This issue presents six expositions, and a recorded conversation, that in their own way are discussing and challenging the circular, as a practice and method, as a model of collaboration, as a theme and as a symbol. Editors are Cecilia Roos and Gunhild Mathea Husvik-Olaussen. Issue number 10 of VIS, Circulating Practices, focus on collaborative artistic constellations that explore temporality and dramaturgy in the exchange of practice and methodology. Collaboration in artistic research often leads to unexpected and process-oriented discoveries. How do we define and situate research collaborations? How do matter, direction and time affectively interact? Who do we identify as the collaborating agents in an artistic research process and how can we discuss authorship/copyright in a co-creative whole? In the editorial work, it has been of interest to look at how the artistic process is reflected in the expositions. Documenting an artistic process can be sensitive and multifaceted. In the context of time-based art, interesting discussions arise regarding the enduring nature of documentation and how it relates to the temporary and processual materiality of the projects. This issue of VIS presents six expositions, and a recorded conversation, that in their own way are discussing and challenging the circular, as a practice and method, as a model of collaboration, as a theme and as a symbol.
Event: The Expanded Librarian
Text+Image relations in post-photographic contexts and literary environments
On Friday 15 September 2023, I was an invited speaker (alongside artist Peter Liversidge) within the frame of a research group devised by artists Beverley Carruthers and Wiebke Leister, which investigates contemporary modes of collaborative image-text-production. My presentation involved me giving a sense of my own language-based artistic research practice, before talking about my involvement as co-founder of the Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for language-based artistic research.
Publication: Practice Sharing of Language-based Artistic Research
Published in Autumn 2023, PRACTICE SHARING II is the second online presentation by the Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research (Society for Artistic Research). Over 60 individuals and collaborations are included in this second ‘sharing’ of language-based artistic research practices presented on the research catalogue.
See PRACTICE SHARING II -
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1538250/1538251
With contributions from -- Annette Arlander -- Dave Ball -- Sue Brind & Jim Harold -- Katrina Brown -- Arturas Bukauskas -- Julia Calver -- Kimberly Campanello -- Delphine Chapuis Schmitz -- Emma Cocker -- Joanna Cook -- Adélia Santos Costa -- Michael Croft -- Cordula Daus -- Kostas Daflos -- Janhavi Dhamankar & Minou Tsambika Polleros -- C.C. Elian -- Martin.P. Eccles -- Federico Eisner Sagues -- João Emediato -- Kate Fahey -- Rob Flint -- Lynda Gaudreau -- Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya -- Sandra Golubjevaite -- Sara Gomez -- Vanessa Graf -- Maria Hedman Hvitfeldt, Mamdooh Afdile & Alexander Skantze -- Kirsi Heimonen & Leena Rouhiainen -- rosie heinrich with An_assembling_“I” -- Steffi Hofer -- Marianne Holm Hansen -- Rolf Hughes -- James Jack -- Benjamin Jenner -- Christina Marie Jespersen -- Molly Joyce -- Krystyna Kulisiewicz -- Andrea Liu -- Ling Liu -- Barb Macek -- Yorgos Maraziotis -- Klaus Maunuksela -- Annie Morrad -- Amelie Mourgue d'Algue -- Antrianna Moutoula -- Peta Murray -- Elena Peytchinska & Thomas Ballhausen -- Julieanna Preston -- Maryam Ramezankhani -- Maya Rasker -- Sarah Rinderer -- Hanns Holger Rutz -- Sarah Scaife -- Lena Séraphin -- Marianna Stefanitsi -- Anie Toole -- Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec -- Litó Walkey -- Kai Ziegner --
Through the gathering of this second PRACTICE SHARING specific fields of resonance emerge including trans-linguality, embodied languaging, voice and vocalisation, site and situative writing, fictional approaches, text as material, experimental reading, just to mention a few. Rather than a definitive or exhaustive archive or survey of the field, the PRACTICE SHARING platform aims to provide a starting point from which future conversations and collaborations might emerge.
PRACTICE SHARING II is co-edited by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin. For more on the Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research and to join the mailing list see - https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/835089/835129
Event: Convocation - A Gathering of Language-based Artistic Research
LINK TO programme here.
Taking place at the Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of Applied Arts in Vienna (3 – 6 October 2023), CONVOCATION II was a gathering of expanded language-based artistic research hosted by the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. Rather than a public conference or symposium as such, CONVOCATION II had a more personal format, allowing for exchange and conversation between the 65 contributors, especially through a process of ‘practice sharing’. The focus of CONVOCATION II was on language-based artistic research “practices”. How can we share research “practices”? What new formats and models might be required? What happens as different practices are brought into relation, into dialogue, into proximity? How might we practise together?
With contributions from: Gretel Acosta -- Louise Adkins -- adO/Aptive (Barnabás Bácsi, Mel Sasha Berger, Martin Gius, Melanie Haberl, Daniel Hüttler, Saara Hukka & Janina Weißengruber) -- Ruth Anderwald & Leonhard Grond – Katrina Brown & Emma Cocker -- Julia Calver -- Beverley Carruthers -- Delphine Chapuis Schmitz & Ines Marita Schärer -- Cordula Daus & Charlotta Ruth -- (D)raft ( Sarah Jackson, Delphine Grass, Helena Hunter, Hannah van Hove, and Maria Gil Ulldemolins) -- Bogdan Florea & Ileana Gherghina -- Gabrielė Gervickaitė -- Sara Gomez -- Miriana Faieta -- Rob Flint -- Sabina Holzer -- Anouk Hoogendoorn & Mariana Renthel -- Sophie Hope & Henry Mulhall -- Benjamin Jenner -- Aleksandra Komsta & Cecilie Fang -- Linnea Langfjord Kristensen -- Wiebke Leister -- Barb Macek -- Tatjana Macić -- Cristiana de Marchi -- Elke Mark -- Adelheid Mers -- Antrianna Moutoula -- Anna Nygren -- Elena Peytchinska & Thomas Ballhausen -- Emílio Remelhe -- Simon Roloff -- Lena Séraphin -- Erika Tsimbrovsky -- The un | common ground collective (Regina Dürig, Marinos Koutsomichalis, Phoenix Savage) -- Litó Walkey -- Kai Ziegner.
CONVOCATION II was co-organised by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin, with the support of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung.
Lectures: Being in the Midst - Approaches to Language-based Artistic Research
On the 8 May 2023, I gave a lecture to MFA students at UniArts, Helsinki, called Towards the Not-Yet-Known: Writing as an Artistic Research Practice. In this talk, I explored different ways of writing from the site of practice, writing as practice. Towards a mode of writing the not-yet-known, where content is not already known in advance, but rather emerges through the material and poetic process of working-with language.
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In June 2023, I was invited as a guest speaker to talk about language-based artistic research (especially through the lens of embodied practices) within the frame of the EU4ART differences project. Drawing on some of my recent collaborations, in my lecture Being in the Midst: An Approach to Language-based Artistic Research, I explored different performative, process-orientated and embodied approaches to working with and through language, sharing my evolving approach to language-based artistic research. EU4ART differences is supported by Horizon2020’s SWAF (Science with and for Society) programme. The EU4ART alliance comprises art academies in Riga, Rome, Budapest, and Dresden. A recording of the session can be found here.
Conference: Dorsal Practices @ SAR
We – Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker – will be presenting a "practice" from our collaborative project, Dorsal Practices, at the forthcoming Society of Artistic Research conference, Too Early/Too Late, in Trondheim, 9-21 April 2023 – see https://sar2023.no/
Abstract: Dorsal Practices
Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open, receptive ethics of relation? A back-oriented approach foregrounds the active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of habits of uprightness + frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming + control. How can this tilt — or inclination — towards a receptive dorsal (dis)orientation enable new modes of thinking, perceiving and being-with; more connected, sustainable ways of living and aliveness?
Dorsal Practices is an interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown + writer-artist Emma Cocker, exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. Since January 2021, Brown + Cocker have investigated the felt experience of a dorsal orientation through body-based, somatic-informed movement scores, followed by a process of conversation on ZOOM for reflecting with-and-through their embodied practising, alongside the poetic-philosophical concepts of the dorsal that arise in this working-with and together. Often undertaken back-to-back (subverting frontal habits of online meeting) the conversations foster sensitive interaction, heightening attention to the experience of listening + being listened to, allowing for an emergent “dorsal voicing”. The ‘conversation’ transcripts are reactivated through a shared experimental reading practice, where fresh insights and understanding emerge in the intersubjective and improvisatory interplay of spoken word, through unexpected conjunctions, (re)combinations, the circling and looping of language.
For SAR, Brown + Cocker will reactivate their conversational transcripts through sharing/enacting the experimental reading practice as a live event, in the very moment of voicing creating a ‘new’ and contingent unfolding of dorsal sense-making.
Details:
See programme here - https://sar2023.no/program3
Friday, April 21, 2023 - 15:30 – 17.00
OLAVSHALLEN: LILLE SAL
Event/research: Language-based Artistic Research (SIG)
@ Society of Artistic Research Conference 2023
Trondheim, Norway
Wednesday 19 April 2023
13:00
SIG slot #1 @Cinemateket
Kjøpmannsgata 48, 7011 Trondheim
In April 2023, we – Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch and Cordula Daus - will be in Trondheim, Norwary, attending the International Conference of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), 19-21 April 2023 – see https://sar2023.no/
During the conference, we will be introducing the activities of the SAR Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. This in-person session during the SAR conference will share recent activities, introducing the current ‘Practice Sharing’ (2023) alongside announcing future events. During the conference we will also announce the contributors for the second edition of ‘Practice Sharing’. See first edition of Practice Sharing here.
The Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) in Language-based Artistic Research was founded and is co-organised by Emma Cocker (UK), Alexander Damianisch (AT), Cordula Daus (DE/AT), and Lena Séraphin (FI). This Special Interest Group was inaugurated in the context of the Research Pavilion, Venice, 2019, within the frame of Convocation, a three-day gathering of expanded language-based practices. Since 2019, this SAR SIG has – through a variety of different formats and forms – connected over 300 artistic researchers interested in language-based practices
Project: Simultaneous Arrivals
During April 2023, I will be in Austria contributing to the research project, Simultaneous Arrivals, which is led by sound and digital artists Hanns Holger Rutz (KUG Graz and GMPU Klagenfurt), installation artist Nayarí Castillo and architectural researcher Franziska Hederer (ISD, TU Graz). Across the project, they are working with invited artists-researchers, including myself as a ‘guest advisor’.
About the project: Simultaneous Arrivals is an artistic research project on novel forms of collaborative practices within the FWF framework PEEK (AR 714-G), running from 2022 until 2025. The past decades saw growing entanglement, simultaneity and proximity within a networked world, announcing spatio-temporal changes. Global instabilities demand new practices of sharing responsibilities. Despite a rich history of collaborative practices, artist-researchers still work mostly isolated in their core capacity in the arts and through the arts. Transformative practices such as relaying (Stengers) and a singularly plural conception of being (Nancy) are interrogated as ways-of-doing in artistic research. The project joins artists using spatial practices (installation, sound and new media art) with a perceptual exploration of spatiality, questioning it to look at the background from which one arrives in and orientates within a space (Ahmed). The project posits a novel mode of collaborative artistic process based on simultaneity and spatiality. They act as ‘basic’ or ‘boundary’ concepts that complementarily guide artists working together, preserving diversity and individuality among the group, while binding the process as a whole and bridging boundaries between different practices. The project designs methods that facilitate contact among the concurrent artistic processes and understand how these concepts affect them. What are reference frames that allow to establish a “togetherness, at the same time”, and how do different types of spaces—thought spaces, aesthetic spaces, architectural spaces—and their corresponding modes of spatiality interact and interfere? See https://simularr.net/
Event: Doing Together
Between 3-4 April 2023, I was at Bath Spa University as an invited ‘ethnographer’ or interlocutor to observe the unfolding “doing together” symposium, and initiate conversation as a plenary session.
Issues in Creative Practice: doing together
3rd-4th April 2023
Locksbrook Road Campus, Bath
doing together is a two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries and the Art Research Centre (School of Art, Film and Media).
This Issues in Creative Practice Symposium will host approximately 20 practical workshops, delivered by staff and PGR students from across the University. Workshops will share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice through doing together.
doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with others from across the university. During this two-day event we will test out ways of doing work together, making our practice-based research explicit.
Event: Performing Process / Embracing Uncertainty
Thursday 23 MARCH 2023
From 18.00 – 22.30
BEAM, Primary Studios, Nottingham
An evening exploring the value of not knowing, uncertainty and failure as generative forces from the perspectives of art and science, exploring tactics for knowing how to not know and for embracing uncertainty during uncertain times. Artistic practice, pedagogy and research often foreground the value of uncertainty and not knowing; are underscored by principles of curiosity and open-endedness, the importance of risk, of trial and error. Yet, how do we know how to not know? Can not knowing and the capacity to embrace uncertainty be taught or even practised? How do we cultivate receptivity to experiences and encounters beyond our zone of habitual comfort? Towards an ethics of uncertainty, how can an encounter with the unfamiliar and strange(r) operate as a micro-political practice that embraces mutual care and reciprocal respect?
Join us for an evening of ‘in-conversation’ between writer-artist Emma Cocker and neuroscientist Stuart Firestein exploring ‘embracing uncertainty’, alongside the UK launch of the publication No Telos! with readings and projections.
This event marks the launch a research project called PERFORMING PROCESS as part of the Artistic Research Centre at Nottingham Trent University, co-led by Emma Cocker and Danica Maier, both Associate Professors in Fine Art. PERFORMING PROCESS explores what is at stake in focusing on the process of practice — the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing?
Free event but booking required on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/performing-process-embracing-uncertainty-tickets-566642301377
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No Telos!
The artists’ publication No Telos! considers different tactics for resisting the increasingly outcome-motivated or achievement-oriented tendencies of contemporary culture, by shifting emphasis from a mode of telos- or goal-driven productivity towards experimental forms of process-led exploration, subversive playfulness and wilful irresolution. This artist's book comprises a series of 'scores' drawing on exercises and practices first developed and tested in Venice. The city is approached as a live laboratory for artistic research. With contributors from Andrew Brown, Emma Cocker, Steve Dutton, Katja Hock, Tracy Mackenna, Danica Maier, Andy Pepper, Elle Reynolds, Derek Sprawson. https://www.beameditions.uk/store/no-telos
Call: Language-based Artistic Research Practice Sharing
NEW Call for Contributions
Artist-researchers working with language are invited to contribute to PRACTICE SHARING, an online presentation/publication of expanded approaches to language-based practice within the field of artistic research. Examples of language-based artistic research are invited focusing on specific practices, processes, approaches, or methods. The focus on language within artistic research is considered from a broad and transforming perspective to include diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography as well as literature; where language-based practices might include (as well as move beyond) different approaches to writing, reading, speaking, listening. The intent is not to define or fix what language-based artistic research is but rather to reflect how it is practised in its diversity.
CALL SUMMARY: How does your enquiry in-and-through language-based artistic research manifest in specific practices and examples? Outline one or two examples from your own artistic- or practice-based research — focusing on specific language-based ‘practices’ (in other words: specific processes, approaches or methods; ways of working, constellations of activity; particular projects or lines of enquiry-in-practice).
MORE DETAILS
See the full call and details on how to submit your contribution here.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: Monday 6 March 2023 at noon CET.