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.

Performance: Drawing a Hypothesis Reading





I am currently working on a performance reading of the publication Drawing a Hypothesis (above) in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer, which we are going to present in a number of contexts during the Autumn. The first performance reading will take place on 22 September 2011 within the context of the exhibition, Graphology Chapter 4 at M HKA, the museum of modern and contemporary art in Antwerp.




DRAWING A HYPOTHESIS
A performance lecture by Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker
Nikolaus Gansterer in collaboration with the UK based writer Emma Cocker will present a performance lecture based on the publication, Drawing a Hypothesis. Using processes of cross-reading and live drawing, their performance lecture approaches the publication as a reader might thumb through a book; where certain sections appear to be lingered over, while others are skimmed in the search for key words and phrases, evocative fragments and extractions. Their reading suggests that books like Drawing a Hypothesis might not always need be read in a linear or logical way, but rather are to be dipped into, allowing for detours and distractions within the event of reading itself. The lecture takes the figures of thought at the heart of Drawing a Hypothesis as points of departure for exploring and performing the correlations between thinking and drawing. Addressing the shifting and ambivalent properties of image, symbol and drawing within the publication, it asks, ‘how can these visual artefacts be comprehended?’


LONELY AT THE TOP
Graphology Chapter 4
(25.08.2011- 25.09.2011)
GRAPHOLOGY was initiated by Edwin Carels (researcher KASK/HoGent)
In four episodes, Graphology explores the automatisms that may show themselves in drawing. The human hand as a seismograph of the inner life, but also, conversely, the ‘mechanical unconsciousness’ of the machine that thrusts itself on the human eye. Printed reproduction techniques lead a life of their own, but how? A series of exhibitions set at the intersection of drawing, photography, printmaking, film and computer graphics. The fourth episode interprets the cinamätographe, as patented by the brothers Lumière, in the most literal sense: as a graphical method to re-produce, a writing of fragmented light images, a play of analysis and synthesis. Contributors include Juliana Borinski, Marcel Broodthaers, Morgan Fisher, Nikolaus Gansterer, Sandra Gibson / Luis Recoder, Wim Janssen, Louis  Auguste Lumière, Jan Evangelista Purkynä, Man Ray, Dominique Somers.