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

Publication: Pretentious Writings


Image: Emma Cocker, Glimpsed.

I have been invited to contribute to a new independent editorial project, Pretentious Writings #001

pretentious |priˈten ch əәs|
adjective
attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is
actually possessed
Origin mid 19th century from French  prétentieux, from  pretention.

Pretentious Writings is a new independent editorial project organized and edited by artist André Alves. Pretentious Writings emphasizes the crossing of meanings; how the modes/mediums of processing information and languages affects our understanding.  The project starts from Alves’ interest in the loss of meaning of the adjective pretentious in its migration from Latin to Anglo-Saxon languages. Pretentious Writings #001 will include visual or textual contributions (essays, poetry, short text, meta-text, concrete poetry…) from invited international writers, poets and artists: André Alves, Chris Reeves, Cynthia Gregory, João Pedro Trindade, Natália Calderon, Ricardo Castro, Eduardo Leitão, Diego Vites, Francesco Ventrella, Angelo Ferreira de Sousa, Virgínia Pinho, Emma Cocker, Valter Ventura, Maria Sottomayor, Danielle van Zuijlen, Patrick Coyle, Rui Silva