The Italic I

Vertigo looms, on the way to syncope. No longer the disordered vertigo of the first discomfort, not the ground falling away. It is a voluntary vertigo, radiating control. Catherine Clément, The Syncope of Rapture.

A diagonal helps to temper the excessiveness of the One. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

In this body of work, Cocker and Thornton explore the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. The studio is approached as a gymnasium, a training space for rehearsing, isolating and interrogating distinct moments or stages within falling. No longer considered an event to be avoided or protected against, falling is apprehended willfully and consciously as an exercise of both mind and body, tested out in physical and cognitive terms. By repeatedly staging a series of falls, Cocker and Thornton attempt to slow and extend the duration of falling in order to suspend and elaborate upon its discrete phases or scenes:

* Softening the Ground – setting up the conditions

* Preparing to Fall – warming and flexing

* Entering the Arc – trust, twist, torque

* A Commitment Made – working against impulse

* Letting Go – a liquid state

* Voluntary Vertigo – ilinx, inclination

* Becoming Diagonal – the italic i

* Touching Limits – tilt towards (the other)

* Ecstatic Impotency – the jouissance of impuissance

* Folding of Attention – heightened interiority

* Embodiment/Disembodiment – mind body partition

* Breathless – ventilating the idea

* Formless – horizontality

* Voluptuous Recovery – return, yet charged

* Recalibrate … Loop – desire to repeat

The Italic I reflects on the capacity of voluntary falling for inoculating the body to the imagined threat of the fall and the experience of uncertainty and disorientation therein. Falling is instead considered as a kairotic site (of opportunity) for producing the vertiginous pleasure of unexpected forms of embodied knowledge and augmented subjectivity, activated in and through active inhabitation of the perceived passivity and impotency often associated with the fall.

Specific Outcomes

Artists' Pages in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think

The productive and generative potential of falling is approached as a physical and linguistic exercise: a photographic document depicting choreographed extractions or scenes in a purposefully unsettling non-linear flow, presented alongside textual reflections on the different states within the event of falling.

On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (eds.) Rebecca Fortnum and Elizabeth Fisher (Black Dog Publishing, 2013) will draw together a number of contemporary thinkers from a range of disciplines along with artists to explore the place of ‘not knowing’ within the creative process.   It is conceived as an examination of the subject through practice and theory and will include both written essays and artists’ projects. The state of ‘not knowing’ or engaging with the unknown is a clearly acknowledged important aspect of all research. For artists it is crucial, as during the making process they may move between a strong sense of direction and a more playful or meditative state of exploration and experimentation. Within this process a sense of not knowing what it is they are doing can be as important as clear intentions.  The book will examine states such as ignorance, wonder, awe, potential and recognizing the new, as well as reflect on how artists formulate strategies of not knowing and ‘play’ within their decision making process. Contributors include Professor Gary Peters (York St John), Associate Professor Rachel Jones (George Mason), Associate Prof Neal White (Bournemouth) and Dr Jyrki Siukonen (Finnish Academy) as well as artists Cornford and Cross, Sonia Boyce, Karla Black and Phyllida Barlow. The publication builds on a symposium held at the invitation of Kettle’s Yard, to accompany the exhibition Material Intelligence in 2009.

On falling, Fall narratives: conference

Cocker and Thornton’s proposed conference paper, The Italic I, has been accepted for the forthcoming conference on falling, Fall narratives: an interdisciplinary perspective, 18th-19th June 2014, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. In this proposed performance lecture the artists explore the different states of potential made possible through voluntarily surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. 

Pamphlet - The Italic I
Cocker and Thornton are currently working with designers Joff+Ollie on an artists' publication which develops the concerns of the artists' page produced for On Not Knowing.