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

Publication: Peep/Show: a Taxonomic Exercise in Textual and Visual Seriality


“We suggest a fluid taxonomy. We would rather set things on fire than carve them in stone” –Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick.

The full text (no.1 – 10) produced as part of my collaboration with Open City, has been published as the inaugural text for the 2nd Issue of Peep/Show: a Taxonomic Exercise in Textual and Visual Seriality , an electronic publishing adventure curated by US based poets/writers Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick. Behrendt and Gorrick had seen the ‘Field Proposals’ I had produced as part of ‘Field Station’ and invited me to submit a text work which worked on the principles of ‘seriality’ or of an ‘unfolding’. I was struck by a particular statement made by the curators of this project (above) as well as the idea of a publication dedicated to an 'unfolding'.


About THE CARNIVAL, PEEP/SHOW ISSUE #2
“Our second issue of Peep/Show is built around the sense that anything can happen when you put a lion-tamer and a human cannonball in the same room. It's about possibility, about disease we've never seen before, a viral opening, traveling on a train to the next town, reinvention, a deliberate reincarnation, the unfounded assumption that everything isn't already written, and the show that emerges from that dystopic assumption.”

Peepifesto
PEEP/SHOW is an electronic poetry publication of previously unpublished work by contemporary innovative writers. A new taxonomic category is presented every five months or so, and unfolds over the course of time, with a large chunk of serially-minded work by a different poet added every few weeks.

Possible uses and manipulation of constrained space
Just whose guided gaze?
fixed vantage point / hiding behind vs. exposing / reading vs. looking
a forbidden secret: a poem
Thomas Weynants, "Early Visual Media"
Through a hole into a vast scene, a panorama in a box
Anne Pundyk, "Unconsciousness Raising" at Brooklyn Rail, Sept 09
Stereoscope, viewmaster, camera obscura
Paul Thomas, "Reconsideration of Space"
serial unfolding
unspooling
undone
Taxonomy Vocabulary
John Kelsey on Rodarte
........to be continued as it occurs