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/Text: Experiments along the brink of I

This text (below) has been written in response to encountering and participating in a series of action-research projects developed by Sara Wookey and Bianca Scliar Mancini 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). Taking the form of a performative prose-poem, the attempt is one of writing out from within a live and lived experience of a project, in order to enact or embody rather than describe or theorise the ideas emerging therein. It extends lines of enquiry from my other prose texts Room for Manoeuvre; or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins (published in The Manual for Marginal Places, closeandremote, 2010); The Yes of the No! (produced as part of The Summer of Dissent, Bristol, 2009); and Pay Attention to the Footnotes (in collaboration with Open City 2007- 2010). The term 'tacturiency' is also the title (coined by artist Clare Thornton) of a collaboration that I am currently developing with her.