No Telos by Emma Cocker

The exposition presents artistic findings and reflections from No Telos, a collaborative research project involving artists Andrew Brown, Emma Cocker, Steve Dutton, Katja Hock, Tracy Mackenna, Danica Maier, Andy Pepper, Elle Reynolds, Derek Sprawson. Telos – from télos (end), téleios (perfected) and teleîn (fulfilment) – refers to an ultimate aim, a specific end or purpose. In teleological terms, the value of action is goal-oriented, determined in relation to achievement and attainment, the event of completion, of reaching the designated target. Conceived as an antidote to the increasingly outcome-driven tendencies of contemporary culture, No Telos is a research framework for exploring the importance of non-teleological activity for creative thinking and making – of playfulness and open-ended experimentation, of not knowing and getting lost. This project invites a shift from a telos- or goal-driven mode of productivity towards one that opens up space for the unknown or unexpected. The first phase of this project took place in Venice (Autumn 2016), against the highly instrumentalised context of the Venice Biennale. No Telos involved experimental exploration of place and process through non-teleological practices of ‘doing’ (the quiet rebellion of making and experimental play) and ‘not doing’ (withdrawal of willed action through meditative attention, slowness and stillness, receptive contemplation and observation). Practices of non-teleological ‘doing’ and ‘becoming’ initiated in Venice have since been gathered within an artists’ book conceived as a ‘score’ for future activation within wider artistic and pedagogical contexts.

DOCUMENTS

Within this page, we gather some of documentation from the event Convocation: On Expanded Language based Practices (Venice Pavilion, 2019) where we shared and further tested some of the practices and activities developed within the No Telos project.

NO TELOS

ABOUT

Reading Between the Lines | Emma Cocker

Texts resonate at different frequencies according to their enunciation; new meanings revealed by changed inflection, in the pauses and durations breathed between the words.How do we read as artists, as writers, as poets? Against utility, against informational acquisition: what other modes of reading might we cultivate? What emerges in the shifts and slippages from one text to another, by reading between the lines? Cocker invited Convocation delegates to engage in a reading practice called Circuiting, where a mode of sense-making emerges by through the chance encounters between the lines within a collective act of reading.

Image: Emma Cocker, Reading Between the Lines, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo and Katja Hock.

Walking the Line | Andrew Brown + Katja Hock

Drawing on their contribution to the No Telos! publication, Andrew Brown and Katja Hock guided participants on a blind walk through Guidecca, designed to overturn the predominantly visual experience of Venice, providing an opportunity to individually explore through body language the apparently contradictory states of togetherness and solitude, being guided and feeling lost. The exercise offered participants a liminoid space in which the real-world consequences of being lost are side-stepped.

Images: Andrew Brown and Katja Hock, Walking the Line, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo and Rob Flint.

VENICE 2017

VENICE 2019

Images: Danica Maier, Associated Thoughts on Line, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo.

Associated Thoughts on Line | Danica Maier

You are invited to listen laterally rather than literally to a live reading using the words of others to chart a path through Danica Maier’s thoughts and explorations on drawing, text, textile and line. Weaving together a meandering line of associated thoughts – these readings explore the act of writing, its fundamental connection to textile processes, and the drawn line within Maier’s practice. Listen to hear the line that is being drawn between the connecting points.

Silent Questions | Elle Reynolds

Silent Questions is a quiet call for the bringing together of small groups in a performative work. Silent Questions encourages participation through performance and is positioned between an exchange of gestures, a collaborative interrogation of language and demarcation of spatial boundaries. Participants were encouraged to work directly with words to make new meaning and with questions that provoke interactions. The spacing of words, texts and complete sentences are explored through gestural exchanges and collaborative acts.

Images: Elle Reynolds, Silent Questions, in Convocation, June 2019, Research Pavilion, Venice. Photographs by Mika Elo.

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