The Italic I Between Live-ness and the Lens

Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton

Within The Italic I, we explore the different states of potential made possible through
purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. Rather than an accidental
occurrence encountered by chance, within our shared investigation the act of falling is
apprehended consciously as an exercise of both mind and muscle, tested out in physical,
cognitive, and even linguistic terms. We approach the studio as a gymnasium, a testing
ground for the live investigation of falling, slowed and extended through the use of both
language and the lens. Within The Italic I, the live performance of falling is not shared with
an audience; instead, we are interested in the specificity of experience communicable
through the mediation of performance through its documents (both photographic and
textual). Rather than view these technologies as somehow deficient or delimiting as
incapable of reflecting the experiential, ephemeral nature of the live event our desire is
one of reframing both performance document and writing as extensions of the
performance process. Central to our enquiry has been the production of an artists
publication, wherein we attempt to capture and communicate the event of falling through
two inter-related forms of document: the photographic still and a poetic-textual lexicon
(distilled from the process of our live conversations). Our exhibition (staged as part of The
Alternative Document, Project Space Plus, Lincoln, 12 February 13 March 2016) and
indeed this presentation are conceived as acts of animation, affording an alternative
performativity to that of the original fall, through the live intermingling of its performance
documents.

Images: Still from Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, The Italic I, video, 2016.

First setting up the conditions. A charged space poised ready for action; a diagonal
support, some means of cushioning the blow. A body falls, over and over, again and again.
Sense of focus, a single purpose the studio dislocates the fall from narrative cause and
effect. Falling conceived as investigative action, entered into electively.

Images: Still from Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, The Italic I, video, 2016.

Practiced falling yet not preparatory, not towards the perfection of a given move or some
future performance. A letting go, a commitment is made to the event of repeated falling in
and of itself, to putting the diagonal under pressure. Stretching, muscular, bodily falling
practiced as a move towards deeper understanding, for becoming more sensitised to the
experience, more attuned to its risings and falls.Within The Italic I, the fall is encountered
almost exclusively through its photographic document, considered less as a pale imitation
of live-ness but rather as a means through which to see again differently, through the
cameras capacity for seeing, both faster and slower than the eye. Over and over, a body
falls, a lens acts as witness. Photography repeats the live event, yet our intent is not to
reproduce or re-present.

Images: Still from Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, The Italic I, video, 2016.

A fall is a period of passage, rather than a series of chronological steps that can be isolated,
observed. Whilst generating the photographic imagery, it became clear that we were not

interested in capturing only what a fall looks like, but rather in reflecting its interiority, its
forces and currents. Not so much a how to fall, as a how is falling. We are not concerned
with freezing the extensive moves of movement but rather seek a visual vocabulary for
articulating the feeling-in-falling, its inner movement as lived experience. We ask: through
what means might we communicate fallings temporality, its intensities and durations, both
visible and invisible, without rendering the lived experience of falling into any singular
spatial form.
In Grace Taking Form, Erin Manning differentiates between the work of Eadweard
Muybridge, whose rapid movement photographs sought to freeze or even pose movement
almost like a series of cinematic stills, and the movement-images of his contemporary,
tienne-Jules Marey whose work was more concerned with the interval, the in-between, the
duration of movements moving.i She notes that whilst Muybridge focused on capturing
the visible moves of bodies in motion, Marey was more intent on inventing machines
for measuring the imperceptible, for somehow making visible the almost invisible
movement of the pulses rhythm.ii

Images: Still from Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, The Italic I, video, 2016.

According to Manning, Mareys practice involved an exploration of incipiency, graphing

not only curves of movement but curves in movement, iii photographic images of
experiential flows, elastic forces, quasi-virtual perceptions not of the movement as content
but of the incorporeal surfacing of the microperceptual.iv She states that, what we see is a
composition of holes (intervals) and wholes (pure experience, duration) that together create
a field of forces around which perception takes form.v Likewise we strive to articulate the
movement-passing of falling through (in Mannings terms) the idea of overlapping states
of transition the animation of space-time where different layers of bodies in transition
interweave.vi
Unlike Muybridges bodies in motion series, we are not trying to capture the
chronological sequence of the fall through the use of photography, nor are we interested in
creating the illusion of actual movement through the re-animation of our photographic
frames. We seek to make tangible the complexity of inner movement within falling; and

perhaps counter-intuitively, the document gets closer to this live(d) experience than the
encounter with the performance itself. However, our photographs of falling even those
that show the blur of movements passing still capture the falls form, slice of falling
rendered static, image as a representation of time-as-space. Whilst the photographic still
might be deemed insufficient for reflecting the lived nature of movement, least of all the
passage of a fall, the sequencing or succession of images has potential to articulate a quality
of experience not even visible in the live performance itself. In developing our artists
publication, we adopted a non-chronological arrangement of images presented as an
extended grid, resisting or troubling the normative chronology often used for presenting
the body in movement.

Images: Still from Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, The Italic I, video, 2016.

Willful disruption of the unfolding logic of a step-by-step guide, our sequences of falling
refuse to be comprehended in strictly linear terms, instead aspiring towards multidirectional reading. Unexpected rhythms emerge through the interplay of intervals or gaps,
the broken beat of abbreviated action. The unsettled, even syncopated, configuration was
used as a means for inviting the viewer attention to become scattered or distracted in its
search for connections between one frame and another, where as with the live experience
of a repeated fall the sense of sequential logic becomes difficult to discern. Our interest
lies less in the articulation of discrete postures or positions, but rather in the intervals and
ambiguities between. Moreover, by reanimating the grid of images as a moving image
sequence, we explore the difference between spatial and temporal forms of documentation,
the difference between a visual rhythm unfolding in two-dimensions (as accumulation) and
the experience of the loops and returns encountered as moving-image pulses and flows in
time.
Rather than communicating the form that falling takes (as a sequence of readable moves or
postures), our intent is to reflect on the lived feeling-of-falling, which remains somehow
irreducible to discontinuous instants. Our re-animations unfold through a succession of
transitions and intervals rather than dwelling on discrete, isolable moments within the fall.
Over and over a body falls, each movement begins before the movement has truly begun:
every move is preceded in an endless falling loop. Additionally, the cross-fading of non-

consecutive or non-chronological frames generates an alternative choreography of falling, a

phantom or even fictional document paradoxically intimating towards an action (a fall)
that did not or maybe even could not exist in reality, but which perhaps comes closer to
articulating the feeling of the fall: fluid, liquescent a mutation of the foot, a hand emerging,
dipping the face in, now the toe.

Images: Still from Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, The Italic I, video, 2016.

Staged as an ever-changing permutational flow, the sense of live-ness created by reanimating the images is not a representation of a live performance (now passed) for the
movement emerging in the interval between one image and another never existed in actual
terms. The movements exist only in the time-space of the interval itself, where to follow
Manning, Elastic, we feel the becoming-form of movements shape. In the amodal tactility
of elasticity, force is stored and then released The release liberates the figure, not a figure
that was there all along but a figure that is virtually creating itself in the interval, almostvirtual.vii

Images: Still from Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, The Italic I, video, 2016.

Alongside the production of photographic performance documents, we have also generated

a textual taxonomy or lexicon for reflecting on the different episodes within falling.
Through language we seek to address the becoming of falling (to fall a verb, a processoriented operation,) not the being of the fall (as noun), reflecting on the interior
complexity of falling which its visual expression can only intimate towards.
Poetic language allows us to linger in and extend the phases of falling in ways that the
photographs didnt fully allow. Whilst often perceived in opposition or tension, within The
Italic I the relation between performance, document and language is approached as a
productive sparring, a non-antagonistic point of encounter absent of competition for
mastery.

Images: Still from Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, The Italic I, video, 2016.

Through conversation we practice linguistic or even cognitive falls, searching for a language
adequate to the task of articulating the experience of falling through falling. Like the body
repeatedly falling, language can be generated from within fall-like circumstances, words can
be pressured until they begin to arc and fold within the dialogic free-fall of collaborative
exchange. Here, the visual performance document operates as the ground against which we
temper the ecstatic effervescence of our conversations. Our intent is not towards a
technical or biomechanical analysis of the movement evidenced within the image. Rather,
we attend to the document for its very gravity, its density; as a necessary anchor point for
tethering our ideas should they become too wayward, over-elevated, tend to veer off course.
Certainly, it can be difficult to shape experience into words, language can sometimes seem
too stiff or rigid, like the body it also needs to be stretched and flexed. Within The Italic I,
the perceived difficulty of putting into words is transformed from problem into
provocation. We recognise a desire for ease as the normative tendency; moreover, how it
creates a parallel settling for tongue-tied-ness. We ask: why would one not want to stretch,
cultivate ones agility in speech as much as action, nurture ones endurance for working out
with words?.
The process of generating the vocabulary for The Italic I has involved thousands of
transcribed words from hours of recorded conversation gradually distilled (over a period of
years) towards a lexicon and emergent poetics for articulating the various phases of the fall.

Our lexicon comprises sixteen categories; their porous edges, they leak and overlap,
moreover, their sequence is susceptible to change: Entering the Arc trust, twist, torque:
Voluntary Vertigo ilinx, inclination: Becoming Diagonal the italic i: Ecstatic Impotency the
jouissance of impuissance: Voluptuous Recovery return, yet charged: Recalibrate Loop
desire to repeat

Images: Still from Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, The Italic I, video, 2016.

Our work unfolds through a permutational logic or combinational process, where the same
material has the capacity to loop and repeat without ever truly repeating; we consider the
play within repetition in ludic terms, where as Roger Caillois asserts, the possibilities of
ludus are almost infinite what to begin with seems to be a situation susceptible to
indefinite repetition turns out to be capable of producing ever-new combinations.1
Neither instructive nor corrective, the lens facilitates an encounter with performance that is
not to do with the clarity or resolution of a given move. Our focus has shifted from
considering the role of the lens as a means for capturing movement as chronological or
sequential frames (the indexical act of witnessing, of being there), towards a desire to actively
inhabit the gap between live and lens-based approaches, as a generative site of action. Here
then, our attention turns towards forms of propositional or even virtual performance
emerging in the temporal interval between the frames. In the seam between one image
and the next we invite the imagining of infinite possibilities; durational experience
conceived as simultaneously indivisible, yet endlessly divisible. Departing from ideas of
performance to camera and real-time capture, we seek to explore how lens technologies
might have the capacity to evoke a quality of live-ness not simply the visual document of
life, addressing those expanded modalities of performance and performativity - those
emergent temporalities and subjectivities - produced at the threshold where live and lens
meet. We ask: how far could the sequence expand between one micro-movement and
another?. Recompose the order. Reassemble. Reconfigure. Test unexpected ways for
moving from one position to another. Extend the duration. Elaborate the moves between.
Activate the intervals. When and where is the time-space that exists between live-ness and
the lens; what is at stake for those practices occupying this interstice? How is the
performance documents aliveness experienced as having an alternative life of its own?

Temporary states, always having to be produced. Reset, retune; continuous present and a
Continual beginning again and again.
This paper was presented as a performative reading alongside a video-work as part the symposium, The
Alternative Document, 13 February 2016. Cocker and Thornton 2016.

Erin Manning, Grace Taking Form, Mareys Movement Machines in Relationscapes,

Movement, Art, Philosophy (Technologies of Lived Abstraction Series), MIT Press, 2009.
ii
Manning, Relationscapes, 83.
iii
Manning, Relationscapes, 84 - 85.
iv
Manning, Relationscapes, 84.
v
Manning, Relationscapes, 85.
vi
Manning, Relationscapes, 102.
vii
Manning, Relationscapes, 34.