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. 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?, 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.

Event: RaRa & Manual for Marginal Places Launch

On Saturday 14 May, S1 Studios hosted the RaRa symposium,  Just Do(ing) It: Artist-led and self-organised cultural activity as resistance to Capitalism and the book launch for closeandremote's Manual for Marginal Places. Images from these events to follow here and also on S1 Studios forthcoming facebook pages.






Image: RaRa symposium, an S1 studios hosted event at S1 Artspace, 14 May 2011




Details about the event
Just Do(ing) It: Artist-led and self-organised cultural activity as resistance to Capitalism.
Building on previous RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt (RaRa) events that have focused on the theoretical and socio-political landscape of a ‘radical (art) praxis’, this event in an artists-led space in Sheffield continues the exploration of strategies, tactics and work being carried out ‘on the ground’ by artists and cultural activists towards a better world. How might we begin to understand artist-led or self-organised art activity in this light?  What examples of DIY, informal or purposefully marginal art practices exist which aim to imagine, create, or operate within new spheres for cultural activity? How do such practices resist and/or maintain a critical relationship with the dominant order and state capitalism? How does the empty but increasingly inescapable rhetoric of Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ effect or alter the stakes of such practice? What role do practices of subversion operating ‘within and against’ the system play in this struggle?
Image: R ebecca Gordon-Nesbitt's presentation
Speakers include:
-  John Holloway (Professor of Sociology, Insituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor, School of Geography, University of Leeds. Author of Change the World without taking Power (new ed. Pluto, London, 2010) and Crack Capitalism (Pluto, London, 2010).
-  Leeds Creative Timebank (Alternative economy initiative http: //www.leedscreativetimebank.co.uk/)
-  Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt (Sheffield-born writer and investigative researcher).
-  Milena Placentile (Winnipeg based curator, writer, researcher)
- with special video contribution from Gregory Sholette (US-based artist/writer on informal art practice, author of Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, 2011)
This one-day event – initiated by Andy Abbott (Black Dogs and University of Leeds), in collaboration with Jane Tormey/Gillian Whiteley (Loughborough University) and S1 (www.S1artspace.org) - aims to provide a space for discussion, critical reflection and evaluation of such questions and tactics through the example of current practice and writers on the subject.
RaRa is a Politicized Practice Research Group project.