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

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).