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. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. 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; 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.

New research project: Weaving Codes – Coding Weaves


‘Weaving Codes – Coding Weaves’, a collaborative project involving Alex Mclean with Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Dave Griffiths, Kia Ng, Emma Cocker, Lovebytes + many others has been funded, by an AHRC Digital Transformations Amplification award. Starting in September 2014 the projects asks: “What are the historical and theoretical points at which the practice of weaving and computer programming connect? What insights can be gained if we bring these activities together, through live shared experience? How do digital technologies influence our ways of making, and what new digital technologies can we create to explore their social use in creative collaboration? Our research challenge is to unravel industrial and contemporary technological developments in weaving and computer programming, in order to expose and challenge assumptions, and make the human processes involved visible. In particular, to explore and communicate the nature of mathematical thinking in ancient weaving, and creative thinking in contemporary computer programming, bringing key contributions to discussion of making in the humanities”.

I have been invited to act as a project writer or even critical interlocutor on this project, attending several of the events and workshops, in order to produce a piece of writing as response. My intent is to develop ideas around the Penelopean practice of ‘weaving and unweaving’ alongside reflections on how the trope of weaving is central to the concept of kairos, ideas that emerged as part of a previous collaboration involving Alex and the Live Notation Unit resulting in my recently published text, 'Live Notation: Reflections on a Kairotic Practice', Performance Research, 'On Writing and Digital Media'.