Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. 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?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Rubric - Document



Site-specific images taken of the series of postcard texts that I have produced in response to the work of the project, Open City, will be appearing in the next issue of the journal Rubric which focuses on the issue of 'Document'. I am currently working with Open City to produce a publication which draws together the whole series of postcard texts (1 - 10) produced throughout our collaboration.

                                     
Image: Open City Postcard Series 


Open City Postcard Series (No. 2.2.1, 2.2.2, 2.2.5, 2.2.6, 9.4.2)


OpenCity is an interdisciplinary art project involving artists Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday, working in collaboration with other artists and writers including art-writer Emma Cocker. It is an investigation-led project that attempts to draw attention to how behaviour in the public realm is organized and controlled – and to what effect – whilst simultaneously exploring how such ‘rules’ – even habits – might be negotiated differently through performance-based interventions. Open City’s projects often involve inviting, instructing or working with different individuals to create participatory performances in the public realm; discrete art works that put into question or destabilize habitual patterns and conventions of public behaviour.

The Open City Postcard Series is an ongoing serialized essay written by Emma Cocker to accompany a series of instructions by Open City (on the reverse of each postcard) that invite different forms of individual and collective action in the public realm.