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

Writing: The Affective City


Movement in the City, Toronto, 2010


I am in the process of writing a new text, provisionally entitled 'Experiments Along the Brink of I', as part of a collaboration with artists Sara Wookey and Bianci Scliar Mancini. The writing draws on a sustained period of conversation with these artists, where I have both been witness to and participant in a series of workshops for exploring 'movement in the city' or even a form of 'social or everyday choreography', including Movement in the City (Toronto, 2010) and Unfolding Zagreb (2009) (also led by Christoph Brunner, editor of the publication Practices of Experimentation: Research and Teaching in the Arts Today - see details below). I am envisaging that the text will echo the model of 'essaying' developed as part of my collaboration with Open City and within my pamphlet-manifesto The Yes of the No!. The chapter/sections deal with (as a provisional list) (1) the affective city; (2) body as force; (3) testing limits; (4) rehearsal; (5) warming/stirring; (6) fold/unfold; (7) speeds and slownesses; (8) collectivity/connectivity; (9) appropriate/appropriate; (10) befitting; (11) immersion & observation. The development of the text undoubtedly draws on my experience of collaboration with Open City (which I have previously interrogated through the prism of a specifically Spinozist/Deleuzian set of ideas in writing such as Performing Stillness). It also connects closely with ideas emerging as part of a text I am also writing on the work of Cezary Bodzianowski (called Squaring up to the Round Hole) and the concerns of the reading group around notions of affect (in collaboration with If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution) that I am hosting shortly at Site Gallery in Sheffield. 


Practices of Experimentation: Research and Teaching in the Arts Today, co-edited by Christoph Brunner

Practices of experimentation lie at the heart of creative research and teaching in higher education in arts. The Department of Art & Media at Zurich University of the Arts offers a unique teaching and research environment as a laboratory of converging and diverging practices of experimentation. Its Bachelor and Master's programs are supported by two research institutes within the department, the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) and the Institute for Critical Theory (ith).
Practices of Experimentation investigates how the different fields of fine arts, photography, media arts and theory interlace with each other, inspire and differentiate one and another. The book presents 15 positions in text, image, video and sound by theorists and artists. They enquire how practices of experimentation constitute one of the most advanced approaches to research and teaching in arts worldwide. They ask how practices of experimentation are able to unfold, take position and enquire current discourses on artistic creation, the relation between art schools and society, the specific production of knowledge in the arts and the particularities of inter- and trans-disciplinary teaching and research in the arts.
Contains essays by Ute Meta Bauer, Maria Eichhorn, Knowbotic Research, Jörg Huber, Marianne Müller, Gerald Raunig, Nils Röller and Richard Wentworth. With a foreword by Giaco Schiesser and Christoph Brunner.