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: Art & Research



My essay ‘Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild’ has now been published and can be read online here. The article belongs to a cluster of research entitled ‘The Enquiring of the Enquirer’ (within my broader research project, Not Yet There), which considers the specificity of thinking (‘knowing’) generated within certain forms of artistic practice, through the prism of philosopher Alain Badiou’s Being and Event. Central to Badiou’s thesis is an elaboration of the ‘event’ conceived as an encounter with that which cannot be comprehended by the terms of the existing ‘situation’; a moment of rupture wherein the ‘new’ might emerge. My article tests artists Dutton + Swindells’ practice against this theory (and vice versa), proposing their work as a manifestation of a ‘truth procedure’ performed in ‘fidelity’ (Badiou) to the transformative potential of the art encounter and possibility of the unexpected or ‘wildness’ therein. The article develops a new critical vocabulary for considering the process of artistic practice (and knowledge production therein), enhancing the burgeoning discourse around artistic research. It proposes a language for interrogating the criticality of the endeavour or enquiry of art practice, rather than resulting outcomes. A condensed version of the text was also published in ‘The Institute of Beasts’ (Site Gallery, 2011). A parallel investigation exploring drawing as an ‘evental site of practice’ (shifting from Badiou’s writing towards Antonio Negri’s conceptualization of ‘kairos’) is also developing within essays ‘The Restless Line’ in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (I.B.Tauris, 2012) and ‘Distancing the If and Then’, in Drawing a Hypothesis (Verlag Springer, 2011). 

ART&RESEARCH
A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods
Volume 4. Number 1. Summer 2011
ISSN 1752-6388

This issue of Art and Research, focused upon ‘Art and Animality’, is co-edited by Ron Broglio (Arizona State University)

Contents include
Editorial: Art and the Animal Revolution
Giovanni Aloi, Different Becomings
Susan McHugh, Stains, Drains, and Automobiles: A Conversation with Steve Baker about Norfolk Roadkill, Mainly
Helen Bullard, Fostering Pidgins:(A conference report on Pidgin Language:(Animals, Birds and Us)
Emma Cocker, Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild
Roz Cran, Am I leopard?: Seeking Animation and Other Possibilities
Alan Currall, Cat Stuck in Organ
Maria Fusco, Fieldnotes from the Urban Pastoral
Ron Broglio and Frederick Young, The Coming Non-Human Community: A Conversation
Ingvild Kaldal and Nigel Rothfels, Reflections on the Vitrine 
Carolee Schneemann, Approaching Animality
Kate Foster in conversation with Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson
Jan Verwoert, Animalisms