Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

All Noble Pursuits

'All Noble Pursuits' is a developing list of impossible, improbable, abstract or absurd quests and searches. Drawing together the factual and fictional, the searches in the list operate at the point where ‘legitimate research activity’ collapses into the quest for rather more indefinable or speculative (or alternatively Romantic or even quixotic) objectives: the search for everything; final meaning; the real self; love; a third way; extraterrestrial intelligence; individualized therapies; a shared moral order; the perfect drug; hope, faith, and a six-second ride; the origins of his evil; the best strain of bees; the real and right; the missing science of consciousness; distant relatives; a patriarchal ideal; common ground; selective interventions; labour-saving inventions; treasure on a desert island; the Cheddar Man.

Image: still/slide from 'All Noble Pursuits'

This is an ongoing multi-format project which attempts to decontextualise and release the process of exploration from its teleological goal, by liberating existing searches from a sense of definite purpose, enabling them to remain irresolvable or unattainable.