Games of Resonance

Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Tacturiency - Game of Resonance, 2012. Produced during Summer Lodge at Nottingham Trent University, July 2012, with the assistance of Christine Stevens. Supported by Nottingham Trent University and Spike Associates & Turning Point South West Curatorial & Travel Bursaries. 

Games of Resonance is an ongoing area of enquiry whose working vocabulary emerged during the Summer Lodge workshop (2012). In this work Cocker and Thornton appear as operatives engaged in a series of opaque or ambiguous tasks, whose visual poetics reside somewhere between séance and shiftwork. A bespoke table becomes a conversational space for playing out the productive frictions and desired points of difficulty within collaboration, performed through a visual and gestural language that is heightened yet economic, minimal yet Baroque. Games of Resonance is conceived as an ongoing series of experiments (‘games of resonance’) for reflecting on the conditions of separation & connection, copying & doubling, attention & inattention, mirroring and echo; restraint and desire, control and excess operative within collaboration; striving towards a performative vocabulary for articulating the nature of the latent knowledge(s) produced therein.

Tacturiency: Drawing Cell (see images below) — the ‘conversation table’ is also used for staging dialogue, a meeting point for collaborative drawing and gestural diagramming, for staging discourse at the point where language proves insufficient, when words fail, are not enough.

Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Tacturiency - Game of Resonance, 2012. Produced during Summer Lodge at Nottingham Trent University, July 2012, with the assistance of Christine Stevens. Supported by Nottingham Trent University and Spike Associates & Turning Point South West Curatorial & Travel Bursaries. 

Games of Resonance is an evolving enquiry which exists in different formats: including the sculptural form of the ‘conversation table’ (awaiting activation); an installation activated through live performance; performance to camera, sound works; as well as photographic propositions and artists’ pages (and any combination of the above).

Specific Outcomes to date

(1) Games of Resonance: Soul Partition in COPY: Papers, Fictions, Scripts & Circles (2012). Artists’ page – photographic still.

Papers, Fictions, Scripts and Circles features contributions from David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Ami Clarke, Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Patrick Coyle, Jamie Crewe, Simon Cutts, Kit Hammonds, Lynn Harris, Jennifer Hodgson, Simon Lewandowski,  Francis McKee, Tamarin Norwood, David Osbaldeston, Alun Rowlands and Erica Van Horn.

(2) Games of Resonance in Revolve.R Revolve: Meditate, Rotate, Muse, Twist, Turn Over In Mind (2013), Artists’ page – photographic diptych. 

Revolve:R is a collaborative project in visual correspondence, curated by Sam Treadaway and Ricarda Vidal in collaboration with a number of international artists,  based throughout Europe and the USA, which culminates in the publishing of a limited edition bookwork. The project explores the possibilities of an exchange of ideas via a visual and tactile – rather than virtual and digital – form of communication. As site and source of collaborative experimentation for diverse artistic practices, Revolve:R is a vehicle for a new collective language, made physical in the shape of the Revolve:R bookwork. Contributing Artists: Diana Ali, Todd DiCiurcio, Patrick Galway, Verena Hägler, Alice Hendy, Antun Maračić, Leila Peacock, Domingo Martínez, Bernd Reichert, Matt Rowe, Emily Speed, Clare Thornton & Emma Cocker, Sam Treadaway, Linnea Vedder, Ricarda Vidal, and the mathematician Oscar Bandtlow.