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

Essay/Publication: Distancing the if and then

Below is a commissioned text for the forthcoming publication 'Drawing a Hypothesis - Figures of Research', (ed.) Nikolaus Gansterer, (Jan Van Eyck Academy and Verlag Springer ). The publication will include contributions from Hanneke Grootenboer (an art historian of the early modern period) and Andreas Schinner (a cryptologist/physicist).


More on the publication to follow soon. 

The text was prompted by a series of 'figures' sent by the artist Nikolaus Gansterer as the provocation towards thinking. The 'figures' included:



Nikolaus Gansterer says of the project 'Drawing an Hypothesis is a publication project dealing with the relationship between science and fiction by reflecting methods of description and interpreta-
tion. My drawings serve as a visual starting point for a dialogue about ideas on ideas. The idea is a central category in philosophy and can also be considered as the driving force behind any creative process. Often this pivotal moment when coming up with an idea is mystifyed especially within arts and science. I am interested delving more into the history of ideas, their critical and visionary potential paired with dubious outgrowths. By inviting different persons from various backgrounds and professional skills (artists/scientists/writers) to participate in the project I am building up a collection  of reading and interpreting images. I am sending out a series of drawings to the participants asking for a micrology (= short explanation/text/speculation) about what they see/read in the graphic display. According to the interpretations I am creating a new series of images to circumstantiate or even negate the supposed theory. By re-returning them to the same interpretor reasking for a new micrology a chain reaction is started. This process of actually “Drawing an Hypothesis” continues as long there is an action potential between me and the interpretators'.