Kairos time: the performativity of timing and timeliness … or; between biding one’s time and knowing when to act

This paper investigates contemporary performance and artistic practice through the prism of kairos, a concept that in spite of the ‘temporal turn’ within the arts and humanities - and its familiarity within literary and rhetorical studies - has remained relatively under-interrogated in relation to artistic making and thinking. Kairos is an Ancient Greek term meaning a fleeting opportunity that needs to be grasped before it passes: not an abstract measure of time passing (chronos) but of time ready to be seized, an expression of timeliness, a critical juncture or ‘right time’ where something could happen. Kairos has origins in two different sources as Eric Charles White notes: archery - “an opening … through which the archer’s arrow has to pass”, and weaving - the “ ‘critical time’ when the weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp” (1987, p.13). The Ancient Greek art of technē (referring to a ‘productive’ or ‘tactical’ knowledge, rather than craft) is underpinned by the principles of kairos (opportune timing) and mêtis (cunning intelligence). Alternatively, for philosopher Antonio Negri, kairòs refers to the ‘restless’ instant where naming and the thing named attain existence (in time), for which he draws example from the way that the poet “vacillating, fixes the verse” (2003, p.153.) Drawing Negri’s writing on the ‘revolutionary time’ of kairos into dialogue with Ancient Greek rhetoric, this paper elaborates the significance of kairos to contemporary art practice and critical imagination, identifying various artistic practices that operate as contemporary manifestations of Ancient technē, or analogously to Negri’s ‘poet’: practices alert or attentive to the live circumstances or ‘occasionality’ of their own making, based on kairotic principles of immanence, intervention and invention-in-the-middle

The Italic I: between liveness and the lens

In this article, the question of ‘the alternative document’ is addressed with reference to The Italic I, a practice-based artistic enquiry developed through collaboration between writer-artist Emma Cocker and interdisciplinary artist Clare Thornton. Evolving gradually (since 2012) through a series of research residencies, exhibitions, publications and performance-lectures, The Italic I explores the event of repeatedly falling apprehended consciously as an exercise of mind and muscle, tested out in physical and cognitive terms. The conceptual implications of falling itself (conceived within The Italic I as both a bodily-kinesthetic and verbal-linguistic act) have been elaborated within other research articles, where we have framed the purposeful action of surrendering to a repeated fall as a training practice or exercise for cultivating a willfully non-corrective tendency in thought, speech and action; for operating against expectation, against normative conditioning (Cocker and Thornton 2016, 2017). For this context, our research focus shifts to address the functioning and performativity of the various ‘documents’ generated within The Italic I, exploring what is at stake at the threshold where live and lens meet, in the gap or interval between live performance and lens-based mediation, between event and document

The Italic I: a 16 stage lexicon on the arc of falling

The Italic I is a practice-based collaboration between writer-artist Emma Cocker and interdisciplinary artist Clare Thornton that explores the different states of potential made possible through purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated fall.1 Rather than an accidental occurrence encountered by chance, within our artistic investigation falling is apprehended consciously as a training exercise for mind and muscle, tested out in physical, cognitive, and even linguistic terms. Within The Italic I the act of falling is slowed and extended through the use of both lens and language, as a means for attending to its discrete phases or scenes. Central to our performative-poetic enquiry has been the production of an artists' publication (of the same title as our project), comprising photographic performance-documents presented alongside a textual lexicon generated in the 'free-fall' of conversational exchange (Fig. 1). The publication is not conceived as documentation (of a performance), but rather as a performative enactment of our enquiry, an exercise companion. We approach the production of the publication as a form of training in and of itself, requiring a specific physical and conceptual practice undertaken towards building — increasing and deepening — our collaborative capacity. Less a step-by-step manual for instructing another on how to fall, we propose the publication The Italic I as a spur or prompt for cultivating a willfully non-corrective tendency in thought, peech and action, for operating against expectation

Notion of notation >< notation of notion

Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014–2017) is an interdisciplinary research project involving artist Nikolaus Gansterer, choreographer Mariella Greil and writer-artist Emma Cocker (working in dialogue with Alex Arteaga, Christine de Smedt and Lilia Mestre). The project unfolds through two interconnected aims: to explore the nature of 'thinking-feeling-knowing' operative within artistic practice, and to develop systems of notation for reflecting on this often hidden or undisclosed aspect of the creative process. We ask: What systems of notation can we develop for articulating the barely perceptible micro-movements and transitions at the cusp of awareness within the process of artistic "sense-making"? How might we communicate the instability and mutability of the flows and forces within practice, without fixing that which is contingent as a literal sign? Drawing on findings from the first year of the research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (including field-work undertaken during a month-long research residency within ImPulsTanz [Vienna, 2014] and a one-week residency-workshop working with researchers at a.pass [Centre of Advanced Performance & Scenography Studies, Brussels, 2015]), we consider notation (and its related technologies) through a diagramming of the multiple, at times competing, forces and energies operative as drawing, writing and choreography enter into dialogue through shared live artistic exploration. Conceived as two interweaving artists' pages we explore these concerns through two interrelated concepts: the notion and notation of (I) figuring and (II) the (choreo-graphic) figure

Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves: Penelopean mêtis and the weaver-coder's kairos

Drawing on her experience as ‘critical interlocutor’ within the research project Weaving Codes / Coding Weaves, in this article Emma Cocker reflects on the human qualities of attention, cognitive agility and tactical intelligence activated within live coding and ancient weaving with reference to the Ancient Greek concepts of technē, kairos and mêtis. The article explores how the specificity of ‘thinking-in-action’ cultivated within improvisatory live coding relates to the embodied ‘thought-in-motion’ activated whilst working on the loom. Echoing the wider concerns of Weaving Codes / Coding Weaves, an attempt is made to redefine the relation between weave and code by dislodging the dominant utilitarian histories that connect computer and the loom, instead placing emphasis on the potentially resistant and subversive forms of live thinking-and-knowing cultivated within live coding and ancient weaving. Cocker addresses the Penelopean poetics of both practices, proposing how the combination of kairotic timing and timeliness with the mêtic act of ‘doing-undoing-redoing’ therein offers a subversive alternative to - even critique of - certain utilitarian technological developments (within both coding and weaving) which in privileging efficiency and optimization can delimit creative possibilities, reducing the potential of human intervention and invention in the seizing of opportunity, accident, chance and contingency

What now, what next—kairotic coding and the unfolding future seized

Drawing on my experience as a critical interlocutor within the AHRC research projects Live Notation: Transforming Matters of Performance (2012) and Weaving Codes | Coding Weaves (2014–2016), in this article, I propose a conceptual framework for considering the challenges and opportunities for kairotic improvisation within live coding, conceived as an embodied mode of imminent and immanent intervention and invention-in-the-middle, a practice of radical timing and timeliness. Expanding my previous reflections on kairotic coding [Cocker, Emma. (2014). "Live Notation: Reflections on a Kairotic Practice." In Performance Research Journal, on Writing and Digital Media, edited by Jerome Fletcher and Ric Allsopp, 18 (5), 69–76. London: Routledge; Cocker, Emma. (2016). "Performing Thinking in Action: The Meletē of Live Coding." International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 12 (2): 102–116. Cocker, Emma. (2017). "Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves: Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder's Kairos." Textile 15 (2): 124–141], in this article, I address the kairotic liveness within live coding's improvisational performance by identifying two seemingly contradictory tendencies within this burgeoning genre. On the one hand, there is a call for improved media technologies enabling greater immediacy of semantic feedback supporting a faster, more fluid—perhaps even virtuoso approach to improvisation. Alongside, there remains interest within the live coding community for a mode of improvisational performativity that harnesses the unpredictable, the unexpected or as-yet-unknown. Rather than regard these two tendencies in antagonistic relation, my intent is to invite further debate on how the development of intelligent machines might better facilitate improvisatory flow, without eradicating the critical intervals and in-between spaces necessary for creative invention and intervention, without smoothing away the points of technical resistance and intransigence which arguably form a part of live coding's performative texture