Emma Cocker’s research while affiliated with Nottingham Trent University and other places

Dorsal Practices is a process-based, interdisciplinary artistic collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer–artist Emma Cocker. This research enquiry explores the notion of dorsality and the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness in relation to how we as sentient bodies orientate to the self, others (human, more-than-human), and interconnected world. Since 2021, Dorsal Practices has unfolded through the interrelation of three fields of experimental, embodied research practice: movement-based practices, conversation practices, and experimental reading practices. Dorsal Practices explores how the tilt or inclination towards dorsal (dis)orientation might enable new modes of thinking–perceiving and being–with, and more connected, sustainable ways of living and aliveness based on the reciprocal, entangled relationship between self/environment. We ask: How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our embodied, affective, and relational experience of being-in-the-world? Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support an open, receptive ethics of relation? Central to this enquiry is an attempt to explore how different linguistic practices might be developed in fidelity to the embodied experiences of dorsality: how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back.

This exposition forms part of the Editorial Introduction by Alex Arteaga and Emma Cocker published in the Special Issue 'Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research', (eds.) Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Erika Goble, Juha Himanka, Phenomenology & Practice, [Vol. 17, No.1, 2022]. ISSN 1913-4711 See full issue here - https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/pandpr/index.php/pandpr/index

Conversation-as-material is a language-based artistic research practice for attempting to speak from within the experience of collaborative artistic exploration, a linguistic practice attentive to the lived experience of aesthetic co-creation. The practice of conversation-as-material, which forms the basis of this article, has evolved through tentative exploration of the questions: How can the shared act of conversation bring into reflective awareness the live and lived, yet often hidden or undisclosed, experience of artistic practice and process, especially within collaboration? How can the event of conversation be developed as an artistic research practice for attempting to give tangibility, whilst also remaining in fidelity, to the pre-reflective aspects of this lived experience? Considered less as a means for talking about, conversation-as-material may be understood as a practice for inviting immanent, inter-subjective modes of verbal-linguistic sense-making emerging through different voices enmeshed in live exchange. Conversation — from con- meaning ‘with, together’ and versare, ‘to turn, bend’; or else, from conversare — ‘to turn about, to turn about with’. Conversation-as-material has emerged as a practice of collaborative writing, which unfolds through the interplay of different voices ‘turning about’ together in conversation. In this sense, the practice can be differentiated from that of interview — for in the practice of conversation-as-material there is no researcher/researched dichotomy. Within the practice, an attempt is made to develop an approach to writing that finds expression first through verbal conversation, which is then subsequently distilled, even densified, towards poetic text. Conversation-as-material involves the gradual revelation of an artistic-poetic, perhaps even phenomenological, mode of emergent writing for speaking from the experience of collaborative co-creation, where linguistic content is not already known in advance, but rather emerges in and through the lived working-with of language. The practice of conversation-as-material thus comprises a quadripartite process of conversation, transcription, distillation, and presentation, where each part involves the activation of a particular aesthetic or poetic mode of attention, perhaps even a specific phenomenological attitude or disposition.

Editorial introduction to Special Issue by Alex Arteaga and Emma Cocker, guest editors.

In this article, the question of ‘the alternative document’ is addressed with reference to The Italic I, a collaboration between writer-artist Emma Cocker and interdisciplinary artist Clare Thornton for exploring the performed event of repeatedly falling. Within The Italic I, the live performance of falling is not shared with an audience; this enquiry explores the specificity of experience communicable in the mediation of performance through its documents, photographic and textual. Less as an indexical record of ‘being there’, within The Italic I, the performance document is approached as a malleable material that is brought into new configurations through repeated staging and restaging. The article explores how various ‘alternative documents’ operate within The Italic I through the interwoven questions: How to present the experiential nature of falling as a force rather than simply representing its form? How to develop a mode of linguistic expression – a poetic textual document – that embodies the live experience that it seeks to articulate? How does restaging different performance documents give rise to alternative modalities of performance and performativity? Indeed, what is at stake at the threshold where live and lens meet, in the interval between live performance and lens-based mediation, between event and document.

Drawing on my experience as a critical interlocutor within the AHRC research projects Live Notation: Transforming Matters of Performance (2012) and Weaving Codes | Coding Weaves (2014–2016), in this article, I propose a conceptual framework for considering the challenges and opportunities for kairotic improvisation within live coding, conceived as an embodied mode of imminent and immanent intervention and invention-in-the-middle, a practice of radical timing and timeliness. Expanding my previous reflections on kairotic coding [Cocker, Emma. (2014). “Live Notation: Reflections on a Kairotic Practice.” In Performance Research Journal, on Writing and Digital Media, edited by Jerome Fletcher and Ric Allsopp, 18 (5), 69–76. London: Routledge; Cocker, Emma. (2016). “Performing Thinking in Action: The Meletē of Live Coding.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 12 (2): 102–116. Cocker, Emma. (2017). “Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves: Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos.” Textile 15 (2): 124–141], in this article, I address the kairotic liveness within live coding’s improvisational performance by identifying two seemingly contradictory tendencies within this burgeoning genre. On the one hand, there is a call for improved media technologies enabling greater immediacy of semantic feedback supporting a faster, more fluid—perhaps even virtuoso—approach to improvisation. Alongside, there remains interest within the live coding community for a mode of improvisational performativity that harnesses the unpredictable, the unexpected or as-yet-unknown. Rather than regard these two tendencies in antagonistic relation, my intent is to invite further debate on how the development of intelligent machines might better facilitate improvisatory flow, without eradicating the critical intervals and in-between spaces necessary for creative invention and intervention, without smoothing away the points of technical resistance and intransigence which arguably form a part of live coding’s performative texture.

Drawing on her experience as “critical interlocutor” within the research project Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves, in this article Emma Cocker reflects 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, instead placing emphasis on the potentially resistant and subversive forms of live thinking-and-knowing cultivated within live coding and ancient weaving. Cocker addresses the Penelopean poetics of both practices, 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.

Within this article, live coding is conceived as a meletē, an Ancient Greek term used to describe a meditative thought experiment or exercise in thought, especially understood as a preparatory practice supporting other forms of critical – even ethical – action. Underpinned by the principle of performing its thinking through ‘showing the screen’, live coding involves ‘making visible’ the process of its own unfolding through the public sharing of live decision-making within improvisatory performance practice. Live coding can also be conceived as the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’, a live and embodied navigation of various critical thresholds, affordances and restraints, where its thinking-knowing cannot be easily transmitted nor is it strictly a latent knowledge or ‘know-how’ activated through action. Live coding involves the live negotiation between receptivity and spontaneity, between the embodied and intuitive, between an immersive flow experience and split-attention, between human and machine, the known and not yet known. Moreover, in performing ‘thinking-in-action’, live coding emerges as an experimental site for reflecting on different perceptions and possibilities of temporal experience within live performance: for attending to the threshold between the live and mediated, between present and future–present, proposing even a quality of atemporality or aliveness.

The Italic I is a practice-based collaboration between writer-artist Emma Cocker and interdisciplinary artist Clare Thornton that explores the different states of potential made possible through purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. Parallel to capturing the event of a repeated fall through performance and its documents, our collaborative activity has involved the production of a textual lexicon for reflecting on the different episodes within falling, generated through the ‘free-fall’ of conversational exchange. Central to our enquiry has been the production of an artists’ publication (of the same title as the project), through which an attempt is made to capture and communicate the event of falling visually and linguistically. This article presents a reworked version of The Italic I, as a central point of leverage and departure against which to elaborate upon the conceptualisation, construction and potential application of this publication as a propositional training or exercise device. Less a step-by-step manual for instructing another on how to fall, the publication The Italic I is proposed as a training spur or prompt for developing the capacity to operate against expectation, for cultivating a wilfully non-corrective tendency in thought, speech and action.