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.

Seminar: Performing Space (Differently)

I have been invited to deliver a seminar in the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield as part of their PhD research and design programme. Drawing on some of my recent projects and collaborations, I envisage this seminar will explore 2 clusters of activity within my current research which explore various 'tactics' for performing space differently (to expectation, convention or habit):

Image: Emma Cocker, Spatial (inter) relations proposition, Vienna, 2011

Performing Communities: interrogates how participatory performance-based interventions in the public realm can help cultivate models of social agency, sociability or temporary collectivity, in resistance to the increased experience of atomization/individualization within contemporary urban life. It investigates the capacity of participatory performance to intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated by producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for rehearsing and testing alternative – ethical, political, critical – forms of individual and collective subjectivity. Central to this area of enquiry are my own practice-based collaborations with other artists: including the project Open City; a dialogue between myself, Sara Wookey and Bianca Scliar Mancini following the projects (Un)folding Zagreb (2009) and Movement in the City (Toronto, 2010); and a recent project entitled Spatial (Inter) Relations in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer and students at the Institute for Transmedia Art, Vienna where sight-lines (or the practice of ‘throwing a glance’) were interrogated as forms of performative drawing for demarcating (even constituting) temporary forms of collectivity.

Cartographies of Escape: focuses on the relationship between how landscape is lived or performed to the emergence of a critical – resistant – form of subjectivity. It investigates how artistic practice can offer a platform for practicing or rehearsing alternative ‘ways of operating’ to the increasingly limited, prescriptive templates of citizenship perpetuated by and within contemporary neoliberalism. Central to this research cluster are the two prose poems The Yes of the No! (produced as part of the project Summer of Dissent) and Making Room for Manoeuvre; or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins, in Manual for Marginal Places.