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.

Ethical Possession

My essay ‘Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives’ has just been published in the online journal 'Scope' in their 10th Anniversary Special Issue and e-Book, which is focused on the theme of 'Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation' and edited by Iain Robert Smith.


Image: still from (On the Heights All Is Peace). 1998.

  Directed by Angela Ricci Lucchi, Yervant Gianikian


The issue (15, November 2009) can be found here 

My essay explores the possibility of a redemptive or empathetic form of appropriation (as a progressive politics of sharing or ethical possession) by focusing specifically on the borrowing of found archival footage within the work of filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi.