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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FEEL

Now drop below the radar of the visual, beneath the cartographer’s contour and the bureaucrat’s grid. Down here at ground level the city is encountered through the logic of a different system of narration; its stories voiced in the language of more marginal and experiential translations. Wandering disrupts the dominant optical orientation of mapping — the static, atemporal form of spatiality through which a place is officially described — by drawing attention to the way in which space is always under construction and understood by the range of senses, not only through sight. At close range it is no longer possible to visually experience the city as a map. It must be registered through another sensory order. It must be felt. Close your eyes and allow your feet to read the streets as though they were braille, as though they were a musical score. Pay attention to its orchestral patterns and invisible tempo — to the repeated rhythms and staccato breaks, interludes, capricious ruptures, to the melody of wear played out and manifest in heavy palimpsest and notations along the margins. Construct a way of speaking back, as an echo or vibration drawn and performed through your body. Choreograph your reply as a silent eulogy, to others who have walked along this way.

From Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016), p. 43. Revised extract of a text entitled ‘Pay Attention to the Footnotes’ previously published as part of a series of publicly sited postcards and artists’ pamphlet produced in collaboration with the project Open City (2007–2010).

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