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In September 2022, I was in Vienna contributing to the Contingent Agencies Symposium (19 - 25 September)¹, as part of a research project (Contingent Agencies) led by Alex Arteaga and Nikolaus Gansterer.

A core group of guest researchers (Arno Boehler, Emma Cocker, Mika Elo, Sabina Holzer, Paula Kramer and Andreas Spiegl, together with the key researchers Nikolaus Gansterer and Alex Arteaga) spent the week working alongside, engaging with the project's core enquiry: attending to the conditioning influence of singular, nameable agencies in relation to the emergence of atmospheres through a specific framework involving Practices of Notation, Practices of Reflection, and Tactics of Showing. This exposition gathers my own responses to this task:

During the week, I was exploring a network of interlocking, even interdependent, language and lens-based practices (using only my laptop as recording device). These practices were:

(1) Marking of video: video recording and then covering the laptop camera with paper when the conditioning influence of a given agency on the atmosphere is registered, alongside (2) Live Writing [screen recording of writing as a live event] and (3) Voicing Observation [sound recording of spoken word] both for attending to how the conditioning influence of a given agency on an atmosphere is registered.

Some thoughts

During my investigations, I found it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to separate the Practice of Notation from the Practice of Reflection. Rather than considering this a deficit of discernment on my part, I came to think of their relation as a hyphenated practice, contiguous practices - or perhaps even as mutually interdependent. Both Notation and Reflection were also interrelated/interwoven with a third (even preliminary) field of Practice, that of Noticing or of Attention. Whilst 'noticing' and 'attention' are intrinsically folded into both notation and reflection practices, there is also a mode of noticing/attending that is practised but that does not generate artefacts. These three practices - noticing, notating, reflecting - were not necessarily sequential, rather looping, circling, or even like a trefoil knot.

Mode of Practice 

* An immediate modality of the practices attempts to be in touch directly, immediately, with atmosphere/agency relation taken as the focus;

* A mediated modality of the practices is activated in touch with the artefacts of the immediate mode.

* A kairotic modality: A form of kairotic or even contingent notation has also emerged in situ: forms of notation that reveal themselves by chance or accident, incidentally as moments of timely opportunity (the flutter of paper covering the camera lens marking the agency of wind; the same paper over the lens for registering the changes in light).²

Interests/Issues

One interest for me has been in how to bring the artefacts from these immediate and mediated encounters into relation - sometimes folding the one into the other (as a second layer - perhaps even of an-notation) within the same frame, or through adjacency, the placing of artefacts side by side. Unexpected connections and relations might emerge through such proximity. Contiguous artefacts: combination, overlapping, interelation, interweaving. I am interested in the contingency of these artefacts, how they might even have a liveness of their own.³ Specifically, how might new combinations and conjunctions arise in the looping and repetition, perhaps even as the initial relation between the different artefacts "falls out of sync", proposing infinitely unfolding permutations.

This project has raised many questions and issues. Here are just three:

* The (im)possibility of separation/differentiation (1):  I had been recalling and reflecting on the Buddhist principle or teaching of conditionality, of dependent co-arising, during the week: that all phenomenon arise in dependence on other phenomenon. How then to focus on the relation of one agency? For the focusing on one has revealed only further the sense of interdependence. What then is at stake in the attempt to focus on one? How indeed might this attempt to focus on 'one' serve as a way of attending to interdependency? 

* The (im)possibility of separation/differentiation (2): the relation of different practices - noticing, notation, reflection - has felt increasingly interdependent, contiguous, impossible to conceive as separate and distinct. What then is at stake in the attempt to delineate one practice from another? What is enabled through their interwoven-ness, their hyphenation?

(3) How to be as precise as possible? In their impulse lecture on 23.09.2022, Karen Barad referred to - Poetics as the best attempt to be as rigorous as possible.⁴ This project Contingent Agencies calls for precision, subtly, nuance - yet how (else) might this be achieved: I was considering approaches of precise vagueness, circling, obliqueness, con-fusion (meaning "state of being mixed together), opacity, illegibility. My own enquiry has tended towards a tentative poetics through the combination, conjunction, or contiguity of artefacts. How does the indeterminacy of atmosphere call for other ways of being precise? What (other) practices and approaches might be required? What (other) lineages of practice might be invoked?⁵

Notes

1. In addition to the core group of guest researchers, there were also daily impulse lectures and contributions from Karen Barad, Gerhard Dirmoser, Tim Ingold, Lambros Malafouris, Erin Manning, Dieter Mersch, and Hans Jörg Rheinberger.

2. This notion of 'kairotic notation' extends my previous interest and engagement with forms of 'live notation', See Emma Cocker (2013) "Live Notation: – Reflections on a Kairotic Practice", Performance Research, 18:5, 69-76, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.828930

3. This sense of 'contingent artefacts' feels somehow resonant with ideas I have encountered elsewhere and also explored in other contexts such as "performing documents" or the "alternative document". For example, see The Alternative Document (ed.) Ang Bartram, Studies in Theatre and Performance, Volume 38, Issue 3 (2018) including my collaborative article. 'The Italic I – between liveness and the lens', Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, pp/238-250.

4. Karen Barad,

5. For example, at one point Sabina Holzer invoked écriture féminine, which suddenly resonated with what Miko Elo had observed earlier when he commented on my writing in light, or in "white ink”. During the week, I had also been recalling (trying to remember, recite to myself) a passage from Luce Irigaray's 'This Sex Which is Not One' (a passage that figures periodically and recurrently within my research as a point of reference and provocation): “Contradictory words seem a little crazy to the logic of reason, and inaudible for him who listens with ready-made grids, a code prepared in advance … One must listen to her differently in order to hear an “other meaning” which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed, immobilized. For when ‘she’ says something, it is already no longer identical to what she means. Moreover, her statements are never identical to anything. Their distinguishing feature is one of contiguity. They touch (upon). And when they wander too far from this nearness, she stops and begins again from ‘zero’.  It is therefore useless to trap women into giving an exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so the meaning will become clear … If you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can only reply: Nothing. Everything.” I am interested in a Penelopian poetics within this approach of 'ceaselessly embracing' a system or structure (writing, language, perhaps even representation) only to then cast it off, to "avoid becoming fixed, immobolised".