Artistic Research Does #7 - 'Tactics for Not Knowing' by Emma Cocker

This research exposition is conceived in conjunction with the publication, Artistic Research Does #7 (2023), which presents a translation of Emma Cocker’s essay ‘Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected’, originally published in Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum, (eds.) On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, (Black Dog Publishing, 2013). See https://i2ads.up.pt/publicacoes/artistic-research-does-7/ In addition to the translation and re-publication of the original text, 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, Cocker shares additional reflections, referring to some of her 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 Cocker’s writing, The Yes of the No (2016) and How Do You Do? (2023). Within this online version these margin notes include hyperlinks that enable the reader to access these different thought-fragments of writing. Artistic Research Does is edited by Catarina Almeida, André Alves. Artistic Research Does is published by i2ADS – Institute of Research in Art, Design and Society is a R&D unit based at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP), financed by the Portuguese agency Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).

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ANOTHER LOGIC

In the realm of scientific method, a hypothesis is tested through experimentation, subjected to rigorous review. The unknown or unexplored situation that the hypothesis identifies as its subject is taken as an inhibitory rupture or break, which needs to be carefully filled or bridged by the production of new knowledge. The hypothesis might be conceived as a preliminary or preparatory moment within a given enquiry — it creates the premise for what follows. However, the hypothesis may also be considered pre-liminal, for it marks the entrance of a threshold zone between the known and the unknown, where things are neither yet proven nor disproved. It is a double-headed arrow, since it looks towards the conditions of the present-past for stimulus, whilst gesturing forwards to the future; to the (imagined) arrival of clearer understanding, towards the moment of realisation. Through the ritual of the experiment, the researcher practises the alchemical turning of the unknown into what can be known, the making consistent of what has hitherto lacked form or definition. Yet thresholds can be crossed in both directions, where what is known can as easily be transformed into what is no longer recognisable or certain. Here, another logic emerges, less concerned with expanding the limits of what is known than with increasing the spaces of indeterminacy along its borders. This other logic is not a critique of scientific method as such, but neither is it the wholesale borrowing of its terms. Rather, it is the emergence of a concurrent way of knowing that reveals moments of porosity or elasticity within existing structures of knowledge, taking pleasure in exposing the presence of perceptual or cognitive gaps. It is the inquisitive finger that finds holes in anticipation of teasing them further open, for the pleasure of pulling at their loose threads. Released from the stranglehold of teleological knowledge production, the formulation of hypotheses emerges as autonomous critical activity, no longer bound by the repetitious cycles of testing and validation to which is it conventionally subjected. Conjecture is rescued from the pejorative, recast as the pleasurable reverie of the thinking mind engaged in nascent speculation.

From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)

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