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.

The Summer of Dissent

I will be producing a new piece of critical writing in response to the proposed Summer of Dissent at Plan 9. The Summer of Dissent brings together a range of practioners seeking to dismantle and reassemble cultural norms through collective action and singular acts of sedition. Events reflect concerns around physical and mental survival - ranging from The Keepers, a mapping project that seeks to preserve and build knowledge of urban wild food, to The Coming Insurrection, a discussion around freedom of speech and textual terrorism. By collectively scrutinising the current geo-political situation through the prism of cultural production these events invite the audience to view, collaborate and question. 


Image: Ali Jones, Everybody Move

The programme at both Plan 9 and off-site venues, includes the enactment of Guy Debords' Game of War by Rod Dickinson & Class Wargames; a psychic meeting calling for an Art Strike by the Second Temporary Art Strike Action Committee (Alytus Chapter); weapon making with Girl Gang; research into insanity by the collective Alialani; and a public swim protest with Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting. 

A publication will also be produced to document Summer of Dissent with a commissioned text by Emma Cocker and a specially produced flyposter from Laura Oldfield Ford.

More information can be found here.