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.

Talk: Between Affect and Concept

Between Affect and Concept: Dialogues between art and philosophy
6th February 2012
Nottingham Trent University


Drawing on examples from within her own research practice, Not Yet There, writer and artist Emma Cocker will discuss how she has brought art and philosophy into dialogue within her work. For Cocker, individual texts become used as testing spaces for bringing philosophy tentatively into the proximity of art practice: in Performing Stillness the act of collective stillness is explored through the prism of a Deleuzian-Spinozist philosophy; in Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild, Alain Badiou’s Being and Event shapes the vocabulary for discussing the criticality of the endeavour or 'enquiring' of art practice, whilst in her recent writing, Antonio Negri’s conceptualization of kairos forms the basis for considering the process of drawing in relation to the production and emergence of a critical subject.