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.

Reading Group: Spinoza’s Concept of Affect


Affect Readings @ Site Gallery, Sheffield
Thursday 3 May 2012, 6pm onwards
Spinoza’s Concept of Affect

The final reading group session at Site moves from considering the affective potential of collective witnessing, towards a return to origins of sorts – engaging with the notion of affect through the prism of a specifically Deleuzian-Spinozist set of readings. The session takes Gilles Deleuze’s Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect (Cours Vincennes, 1978) as its starting point for discussion, alongside the additional reading of the chapter Spinoza and Us (taken from Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1988).