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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BETWEEN EFFORT AND EASE

Material exploration involves navigation and negotiation, between recognising one’s own capacity to affect and for being affected by other forces. Between effort and ease. Between control and letting go. All this practised in hopeful anticipation of a transition from the working of the work to the work working, that moment of conversion where the labour (the working out, working through) somehow becomes the work itself. How to account for this qualitative transformation? Within the process itself, the moments of the work working can be when it feels least like work, those flow states of absorption or immersion where action and awareness merge, edges between subject/object blur. This process is not for the half-hearted. Not a going-with-the-flow, a form of passivity unwilling to accept responsibility or make decisions. Flow is a precarious condition easily lost to drifting thought, to self-consciousness or self-congratulation. It is an experience reported only in retrospect, for even the smallest breaks in rhythm risk faltering the flow.

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

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