ABSTRACT
Drawing on a series of recent artistic research collaborations, Emma Cocker’s contribution presents and reflects upon her method of ‘conversation-as-material’ as a practice of ‘writing without writing’, where conversation is conceived as both site and material for the construction of an inter-subjective and immanent mode of linguistic sense-making. Conversation-as-material involves the quest for a not-yet-known vocabulary emerging synchronous to the situation that it seeks to articulate. Within this approach, meaning does not exist prior to the event of utterance, but rather is discovered – often retrospectively – through a recorded dialogic process that is transcribed and gradually distilled towards an emergent poetics.
