Developing research initiated during a
previous collaborative workshop (Summer
Lodge, NTU, 2012). Cocker and Thornton conceive Tacturiency as a
research field for pressuring the self towards its limits and for examining the
affective knowledges produced along the thresholds between self/other,
self/world.
Provisional Statement - 2012/13
Tacturiency (the word
meaning the desire of touching,
to touch, to be touched) is a practice-based
interdisciplinary collaboration involving performance, photography, video,
sculptural-material practice & poetico-theoretical reflection. Conceived as
a series of discrete episodes or experiments, Tacturiency tests
different tactics (touching/folding/fainting/falling) for pressuring the self
towards its limits, the boundary where self/other, or self/world begins to
blur. For Cocker and Thornton, loss of selfhood is experienced as an ecstatic
site (of opportunity) for activating unexpected forms of embodied, tactical
knowledge (techné) and augmented subjectivity, in and through
active inhabitation of the perceived passivity and impotency
often related to the idea of a fall (from the known, normative, certain or
stable). Both language and the body — mind and/as muscle — are subjected to a
series of training exercises, flexing between excess and restraint, precision
and unruliness, economy and intensity of expression. Placing emphasis on
heightened states of encounter with material, language and site, Tacturiency advocates
a performative, even ritualized, approach to research where new knowledge and
its attendant vocabularies are not so much produced through rational discourse
as invoked, summoned, called forth. Tacturiency weaves together
textual, tactile and choreographic methodologies to produce the liminal
conditions of a fall from or folding of self. It simultaneously attempts
towards a poetico-material vocabulary for faithfully attesting
to the affective (often unseizable, unspeakable, invisible) knowledge(s)
generated through this experience.
These ideas are currently being tested
through 3 interconnected areas of research enquiry for diagramming knowledge as the affective friction produced through
folding self with other, space or site; where activated reading, diagrammatic
drawing and performative conversation become key methods of investigation. Each
research episode involves performance/photography/video/sculptural-material
practice & poetico-philosophical reflection.
(1) Games of Resonance: a bespoke 'conversation table' becomes used for a series of experiments (‘games of resonance’) reflecting
on the conditions of separation & connection, copying & doubling,
attention & inattention, mirroring and echo; repeated epiphanies striving
towards a performative vocabulary for articulating the nature of those latent
knowledge(s) operative within collaboration.
(2) The Italic I: This area of enquiry
elaborates upon the discrete knowledge(s) produced within the various scenes of falling, fainting &
syncope: from Softening the Ground
(setting up conditions) and Entering the
Arc (turn, twist, torque) to Letting
Go (liquid state), through Voluntary
Vertigo and Becoming Diagonal,
towards Ecstatic Impotency (jouissance of impuissance) and Voluptuous
Recovery (return to self, charged).
(3) Folding
Attention (Proposed research residency): The Scottish tidal island Davaar
(known for its caves) is approached as a live site for further investigating
and experimenting with states of separation/connection;
interiority/exteriority; spatial immersion/openings, and the figure of the
bubble/pocket.
