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: What/how is critical?

Thursday 9th September
Eastside Projects, Birmingham
http://www.eastsideprojects.org



What (how) is critical?
The first in a series of ESP events using writing to generate discussion, I have been invited to respond to the question, ‘What is critical?’ with reference to Irit Rogoff's text 'From Criticism to Critique to Criticality'.
I am hoping to use the session to 'open up' a conversation for exploring the critical as the 'gap' or mode of attention produced between crisis and receptivity, rupture and affirmation.