Research Catalogue

A collaboration between visual artist, Danica Maier and composer, Martin Scheuregger - Score: Mechanical Asynchronicity takes a single historical lace draft from the Nottingham Lace Archive as the starting point for new live and installation-based visual-musical works. The working process and presentation of Score: Mechanical Asynchronicity sees the fine artist become ‘composer’ and composer become ‘artist’. Their roles move from user – of each other’s discipline knowledge, aesthetic understanding and technique – to author of works that are contingent on their collaboration but can still be identified as belonging to their individual practices. You can navigate this exposition through a series of prompts each focusing on a different aspect or way to engage with the work: Look, Listen, Read, Play, and Watch. Read: offers an opportunity to understand further details about the project including pilot works, experimental development, key events and practical details. Look: will share images of the scores created by Maier and Scheuregger, and the original historical lace draft. Listen: gives you a chance to hear original music box sound pieces as well as Side A and B of the recorded pieces. Play: allows you to ‘play with' the individual tracks allowing you to create a combined piece in various iterations including 1-4 musicians. Watch: includes film documentation from four different concert versions to view.

Practice Research

PERFORMING PROCESS is a research group within the Artistic Research Centre at Nottingham Trent University, co-led by Emma Cocker and Danica Maier, both Associate Professors in Fine Art. We ask: what is at stake in focusing on the process of practice — the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing. What is the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within artistic research? How might a process-focused exploration intervene in and offer new perspectives on artistic practice and research, perhaps even on the uncertain conditions of contemporary life? PERFORMING PROCESS has origins in a number of critical precedents: Summer and Winter Lodges originating within the fine art area (practice-research residencies or laboratories dedicated to providing space-time for making-thinking and for exploring the process of practice), collaborative artistic research projects such as No Telos, for exploring the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity; the DREAM seminar series with PhD researchers which focuses specifically on the ‘how-ness’ of practice research by asking - How do we do what we do?

The exposition presents artistic findings and reflections from No Telos, a collaborative research project involving artists Andrew Brown, Emma Cocker, Steve Dutton, Katja Hock, Tracy Mackenna, Danica Maier, Andy Pepper, Elle Reynolds, Derek Sprawson. Telos – from télos (end), téleios (perfected) and teleîn (fulfilment) – refers to an ultimate aim, a specific end or purpose. In teleological terms, the value of action is goal-oriented, determined in relation to achievement and attainment, the event of completion, of reaching the designated target. Conceived as an antidote to the increasingly outcome-driven tendencies of contemporary culture, No Telos is a research framework for exploring the importance of non-teleological activity for creative thinking and making – of playfulness and open-ended experimentation, of not knowing and getting lost. This project invites a shift from a telos- or goal-driven mode of productivity towards one that opens up space for the unknown or unexpected. The first phase of this project took place in Venice (Autumn 2016), against the highly instrumentalised context of the Venice Biennale. No Telos involved experimental exploration of place and process through non-teleological practices of ‘doing’ (the quiet rebellion of making and experimental play) and ‘not doing’ (withdrawal of willed action through meditative attention, slowness and stillness, receptive contemplation and observation). Practices of non-teleological ‘doing’ and ‘becoming’ initiated in Venice have since been gathered within an artists’ book conceived as a ‘score’ for future activation within wider artistic and pedagogical contexts.