Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. 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; 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?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Publication: [...]


Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, Apeirophobic Framework (2011) production still from HD Video

A new publication by Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, featuring works from their current tour and texts by myself and Brian Dillon, published by VIVID and designed by James Langdon will be launched at ArtSway on 11 June 2011. The publication will be launched in conjunction with the exhibition, Apeirophobia, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry (16 April - 12 June 2011).

‘Apeirophobia’ means a fear of the future - a phobia that compels sufferers to plan every element of their lives so that they know exactly what the future has in store for them. Apeirophobia is one part of an international touring programme of new work commissioned in collaboration with VIVID and Danielle Arnaud - with the exhibition at ArtSway featuring works from each stage of the tour. These works explore Kihlberg & Henry’s ongoing interest in the condition of the viewer in time and space.

I have been working on a structure for a non-linear or even woven text where the reader is not encouraged to follow a single written trajectory but rather explore overlapping and interrelated paragraphs. A footnoting system is proposed to run through the text, where each paragraph becomes the footnote for another which in turn becomes the footnote for another.