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.

Event: Live Notation


I have been invited by Hester Reeve to attend the Live Notation Unit’s symposium at Arnolfini, with the view to producing some new writing. I am enviging that this might help me develop some ideas in relation to my current research in relation to drawing’s (notation’s) speculative and constitutive potential, and the possibility of critical subjectivity and knowledge produced therein, where I have been thinking about drawing as a form of techné and the kairotic potential (or opportune timing) of such a practice. Drawing on philosopher Antonio Negri’s writing on ‘kairos’, I am currently interrogating drawing’s knowledge as a kairotic event, as the restless instant where naming (drawing) and the thing named (drawn) attain co-existence (in time).


LIVE NOTATION UNIT

Live artists and live coders, working towards live notation

http://livenotation.org/

27th July 2012
2pm-9:30pm

Arnolfini, Bristol BS1 4QA
Symposium and performances

The Live Notation Unit (LNU) takes over the Arnolfini for a day using its spaces as an experimental laboratory in which to combine two radical performance practices: Live Art and Live Coding. The LNU will approach programming as performance art, performance art notation as code, code as speech, bodies as interpreters, and more.
On the menu are improvisational sound works (where computer code and the artists’ bodies become instruments), site-specific time based art works (where notation becomes the ‘piece’ as opposed to its recording device) and a series of position papers proposing what the LNU’s new term “live notation” might signify.

Bringing together Sam Aaron, Geoff Cox, Yuen Fong Ling, Dave Griffiths, Alex McLean, Brigid Mcleer, Thor Magnusson, Click Nilson, Hester Reeve, Kate Sicchio, Andre Stitt, Maria X, and Matthew Yee-King.

For more information and a preliminary programme, please the Live Notation Unit website:
http://livenotation.org/

 Below is my text written in response to the Live Notation Unit event.