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

Event: Life - A Users Manual


I will be chairing this event (below) as part of Art Sheffield 2010 Life: A Users Manual . I hope that this event will provide a space to further tease out ideas which have been emerging in some of my recent writing including Performing Stillness and Performing Collectivity, around the affective experience of collectivity and community (particularly through the prism of Spinoza's Ethics).

In Conversation Event
Saturday 24 April 2pm
Showroom Cinema

Frederique Bergholtz will discuss some of the issues raised by Art Sheffield 2010 ­ Life: A Users Manual. Frederique Bergholtz is a co-curator of Art Sheffield 2010 and director of the rolling platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.  

She will be in conversation with participating artist (and lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University) Becky Shaw, following which there will be opportunity for discussion, facilitated by Emma Cocker (Writer and Senior Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University)

Context

The title of Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual, refers to Georges Perec’s 1978 novel in which he builds up a detailed picture of the inhabitants of a single apartment block by describing the spaces in which they live, the objects in their rooms, the photos and paintings on the walls. There is something to this concentration on detail and the relationship between the individual and the collective that seems timely to explore when we feel as never before, especially with the current crisis, the effects of economic and social pressures on our everyday actions. Attempting to grapple with such global changes and not be overwhelmed by them, venturing to ask ‘where am I in this?’ is where art and the encounters it creates can be most powerful.
A key concern is to explore the notion of ‘affect’. Often used interchangeably with the experience of feeling or emotion, it is essentially an ability to affect others and in turn to be affected by them. Art Sheffield 2010 - Life: A User’s Manual proposes that unspectacular acts of everyday ‘affect’ might be a way to chart a path through current circumstances. Affect, not understood in the romantic sense as the catharsis often promised by art, but as the potential for embodied interpersonal experience which may suggest the next possible step within the bigger picture.