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.

Publication/Exhibition: In The Presence of Multiple Possibilities

I have been invited to contribute to a publication by Ordinary Culture, part of the exhibition In The Presence of Multiple Possibilities. My contribution will be from my ongoing series, Close Readings.



Background to the exhibition
In The Presence Of Multiple Possibilities takes as its focus the philosophical (and everyday) notion of contingency - That which cannot be ascertained to be true, nor false, in any given situation. The selection of works has focused on those that seek to make flexible the rigid, or unpick the fabric of a given system or structure, to reveal the contingent space of possibility in its production. 

In The Presence of Multiple Possibilities combines sculpture, video, performance and publication to draw attention to, and attempt to manifest, the discrepancy between predicted future and actual outcome.
 The exhibition brings together eight artists who explore the complex contingencies of translation, spontaneity, prediction and speculation. Either creating a structure for a continued development or deliberately leaving a work incomplete or uncertain, their works provide a space for the contemplation of multiple possible outcomes. Whether durational or static, all of the works hint towards their role in a longer trajectory. The project will include new commissions by Kimi Conrad, Matthew Noel-Tod and a commissioned publication by collective Ordinary Culture (formerly YH485). Ordinary Culture’s contribution to the project explores the publication as incomplete and subject-to-change, encouraging the participation of the audience in the materialisation of the exhibition’s legacy. "The commissioned work takes the form of a simple binding, appropriating the outer shell, the cover, of a book. Within this binding there is a space for the users own configuration of content. Multiple Possible content formulations exist as the user navigates the exhibition space, selecting printed matter relating only to their favoured work, or simply relying on their impulsive selection to gather the content for their own loose-leaf book. As the exhibition goes on, and the events programme starts to unravel more content becomes available, and so the possibilities for the users personal publication fluctuates, and becomes temporal, again a tinkering with this idea of limited editions, distributed forms and publishing as a medium"

Organised by MA Curating Contemporary Art students at the Royal College of Art, the project is funded by Arts Council England through Wysing Arts Centre’s Escalator Programme.