dorsal practices [re-turning]
(2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Katrina Brown
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition comprises textual fragments (both written and voiced) produced through the act of returning to (in turn re-activating, re-configuring, even re-imagining) conversational transcripts generated within the artistic research project Dorsal Practices, a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. Initiated in January 2021, Dorsal Practices is an artistic collaboration for exploring how the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world. Conceived at the threshold between choreographic-movement practices and language-based artistic research, Dorsal Practices explores how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back, moreover, through a practice of coming back, the act of (re)turning. The original transcript material that forms the basis of this exposition was produced through a practice of conversation undertaken within six interrelated blocks of exploration, taking place over 18 months between October 2022 and February 2024. Within this period of enquiry, we — Brown and Cocker — focused our attention on the act of returning within our shared practice, re-imagined as a "dorsal turn". Through the intermingling of two registers of language-based practice, that is, through the performativity of both the written and spoken texts themselves, within this exposition we attempt to make tangible how the dorsal gesture of the turn and the circling principle of re- become operative as a spinal thread within our shared enquiry. Deviating from the straightforwardness of a strictly linear text, we invite a form of dorsal listening-reading that might engage through loops and returns. We conceive the research artefacts generated through the practice itself as the central focus within this exposition, alongside a supporting text where we introduce the wider enquiry of Dorsal Practices, reflecting on how we conceive the act of turning and of re-turning therein.
How to Facilitate Careful Listening and Non-Coercive Participation in Artistic Research? LED Tickers and Love Letter Writing as Research Tools
(2025)
author(s): Joonas Lahtinen
published in: Research Catalogue
In this contribution, I introduce and outline productive possibilities that LED ticker displays and love letter writing can offer for facilitating careful listening and non-coercive participation in artistic research, and in research-driven artistic practice. Briefly put, by the term “careful listening” in this context, I refer to modes of listening that are attentive to the contents of what is being said, but that also allow for and encourage the reflection of the subjective and “intra-active” (Karen Barad) dimensions inherent in, and the material-performative and situated conditions of, listening. The term “non-coercive participation”, for its part, refers here to participative art-based practices that are careful – or caring – in the sense that they leave room for different modes or “degrees” of participation, and in that they aim to take the potential processes of exclusion and coercion rooted in the practical decisions and material circumstances regarding the devising and realization of the given project into account.
Operating on the premiss that reading can be considered as a form of listening and attending to the text and its contents (Michelle Boulous Walker), and drawing on two recent endeavours I was part of in different yet cross-pollinating roles – as an advisor and collaborator in the artistic research project ‘TACTICS for a COLLECTIVE BODY’ (AP Schools of Art Antwerp, 2020–22), and as the artist-initiator of the installation ‘Love Letters’ in public space (Kunstzelle, WUK Vienna, 2023–24) – I discuss and present, first, ways in which love letter writing can function as a tool for – or mode of – careful listening, thereby fostering democratic and attentive dialogue between investigators within the frames of an artistic research project, and as a tool for offering a caring and accessible starting point for non-coercive participatory art practice. Secondly, I aim to show how the use of seemingly simple LED ticker displays can promote careful listening and non-coercive participation both in research workshops, showings, and artistic practice while, in the Rancièrean sense, also making the material-performative, “intra-active”, situated and auditive qualities of text and reading visible and sensible.
Tending towards each other: between breath and inscription
(2025)
author(s): Thais Akina Yoshitake Lopez
published in: Research Catalogue
This research is grounded in the relation between listening and orientation through a kindred gesture: tending towards. Its object of inquiry is the dialogue between Paul Celan’s poems and Gisèle Lestrange-Celan’s etchings in the publication Atemkristall (Brunidor 1965, Vaduz). The choice of this pairing arises from the possibility of bringing together two elements: the breath and the ground. I follow the flux and exchange between breathing gestures and inscription across the poems and etchings, approaching the images not as illustrations or representations of the text but as spatial configurations of encounter—between readers, listeners, makers, and witnesses.
Attendance as a gesture of attention becomes palpable when the poet imagines that “the poem is pneumatically touchable” and that “the reader breathes into the poem.” In this turning-towards-the-poem, the etchings invite a reading of the poet’s gesture as it inclines toward another practice and medium. My interest lies in how, within this publication, both media affect and reorient one another, generating a shared space of reading. Extending this form of listening means approaching the relation between word and image as the opening of spaces of attention—listening as inclination, as stance, before any immediate attempt of translation.
FERRY EXPERIMENT: READING LINE AND SOUND | PHYSICAL MOVEMENT LAB
(2021)
author(s): Greta Pundzaite
published in: Research Catalogue
Ferry Experiment: Reading Line and Sound aims to grasp movement in different artistic elements and trace their interconnection. A sound of a ferry trip Lisbon-Berreiro is recorded as if from two differing ears of a passenger. One traces the movement of detailed noise inside while the other lowers itself to the machinery and gives an impulse of the repetitive swing of moving water. A drawing is created as a result, dismounted to its detail and used together with the sounds as a continuation searching itself in the movement of a body.
Reading on Reading: Ecologies of Reading
(2020)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Lena Séraphin, Cordula Daus
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Reading on Reading is a series of experimental reading practices developed collaboratively by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin whilst working together in the Research Pavilion #3, Venice, 2019, for exploring what alternative modes of sense making are produced when reading is undertaken artistically, as an aesthetic activity.
Reading on Reading explores three interrelated foci: How can aesthetic practices of reading: (1) Shed new light on the phenomenology (or how-ness) of reading? (2) Transform the often-solitary activity of reading into a shared or communal act — and explore what modes of sociality, solidarity and emergent ‘we’ emerge therein? (3) Operate as a disruptive process unsettling normative conventions of reading through focus on the poetic, affective and material dimensions of readerly experience?
Within this artistic research collaboration, we consider the act of reading beyond the relation of the reader to a text read, as a micro-political or ethico-aesthetic practice through which to re-consider — perhaps even re-organise — the relations between self and other(s), self and world. Drawing upon Félix Guattari’s notion of ecosophy with its three ecological registers of environment, social relations and human subjectivity, in this exposition we consider how the modest practice of reading together could contribute to a wider ethico-aesthetic project: for cultivating shared poetics of attention, for the re-sensing of language through embodied vocalisation, for tending to the temporary gatherings of ‘we’ that reading together affords.
The aim of this exposition is to share the reading practices tested and explored in and through the collaboration of three artist researchers, alongside reflection on the questions and concerns emerging within this enquiry. Whilst operating as a document or archive of a specifically time-bound research activity, the intention is that our reading practices have scope to be activated by other readers.
Dorsal Practices: Vibrating with the Hum of the World
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition presents recordings of a live improvisatory performative reading practice activated as part of the artistic research project Dorsal Practices, a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker. This performative reading practice was activated as a way of generating the textual component of a journal article by Brown and Cocker entitled 'Dorsal Practices — Vibrating with the Hum of the World', submitted to the Special Issue ‘On Landscape’, Performance Research Journal. The article itself is comprised of textual fragments that have been distilled from the transcript of this reading practice.
Dorsal Practices
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Katrina Brown
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Initiated in 2020, Dorsal Practices is a collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown and writer-artist Emma Cocker, for exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orient to self, others, world. How does the cultivation of a back-oriented awareness and attitude shape and inform our experience of being-in-the-world? A dorsal orientation foregrounds an active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of predominant social habits of uprightness and frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming and control. Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a back-leaning orientation support a more open and receptive ethics of relation? How are experiences of listening, voicing, thinking, shaped differently through this tilt of awareness and attention towards the back?
Typeface design for visually impaired children
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Ann Bessemans
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Due to the low quality level of visual input they receive in the form of printed text, beginning visually impaired readers are at a disadvantage in comparison to their peers. In the past, typography has often been looked upon as a useful instrument to improve the legibility of the printed reading material that is being offered to children with low vision. However, the legiblity research efforts that were at the base of this conception were not always of good quality. In cognitive science for example, many efforts were made that were methodologically correct, yet the test material (the used typefaces) had little to do with reality. Many typefaces that were supposed to improve legibility were also suggested by typographers themselves, but the reasoning behind them was hardly ever sufficiently methodologically supported. Moreover, most legibility research focused on people with low vision in general, ignoring the fac t that visually impaired children constitute a very particular group with specific issues. This doctoral research project by in design, by Ann Bessemans, seeks to shed a light on legibility in the context of visually impaired beginning readers. Starting from these findings and from a legibility research a first step is given to design a typeface that will be able to provide support for the target group of visually impaired children in the first stages of the reading process.
Ferry Experiment: Reading Line and Sound aims to grasp movement in different artistic elements and trace their interconnection. A sound of a ferry trip Lisbon-Berreiro is recorded as if from two differing ears of a passenger. One traces the movement of detailed noise inside while the other lowers itself to the machinery and gives an impulse of the repetitive swing of moving water. A drawing is created as a result, dismounted to its detail and used together with the sounds as a continuation searching itself in the movement of a body.open exposition comments (0)