(Un)Doing-Being Together-Apart (part of Doing Together 2023)
doing together is a yearly two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by Bath Spa University’s Centre of Cultural and Creative Industries and Art Research Centre. Workshops, delivered by staff and PGR students from across the University, share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice. doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with colleagues from a range of different Schools. Throughout the symposium, facilitators - alongside participants - test out ways of doing together in an effort to make their practice-based research explicit, rather than simply describe it.
Doing Together 2023 was concluded with a plenary session delivered by Dr Emma Cocker (Associate Professor, Nottingham School of Art & Design) who shared her thoughts & findings from the symposium. She has since written '(Un)Doing-Being Together-Apart', an essay that reworks the transcript of the plenary session (with additional references). The text is an attempt to 'remain in fidelity to the texture of the unfolding reflections that were offered during the experiential liveness of the event itself’.
Text published 22 March 2024.
Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research includes diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language, involving an ecology of embodied, relational and performative writing, reading, conversation and listening-based practices. Cocker’s writing is published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2011; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User’s Manual, 2022; Writing Choreography: Textualities of and beyond Dance, 2024, and the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2024. She is co-founder of the Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research, 2019.
