Workshop: Summer Lodge 2012

In July 2012, Cocker and Thornton began the first phase of their collaboration, Tacturiency, as part of Summer Lodge, an annual workshop event in the fine art studios at Nottingham Trent University. With thanks to Christine Stevens for her excellent assistance during this phase of the project.

Provisional Statement following Summer Lodge - 2012/13

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.

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 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: During this episode 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 of 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.