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.

Project: Method Lab - What If?



METHOD LAB I: WHAT IF?" The interdisciplinary research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line by artist Nikolaus Gansterer, choreographer Mariella Greil and art-writer Emma Cocker is in residence at the Impulstanz Festival Vienna during July and August 2014. In dialogue with a team of international critical interlocutors including Alex Arteaga, Lilia Mestre and Christine de Smedt and other guests, Method Lab I focuses on the sharing of practice and working methods between the key researchers, in order that set disciplinary ways of operating might gradually become undisciplined, unlearnt, undone, reversed, upturned by experimenting ‘between the lines’ of drawing, choreography, and writing. What if line becomes movement or sound; what if language is danced; what if words are drawn rather than written? (Image: Choreo-graphic Figures (part of Beyond the Line, Bonington Gallery), 2014, Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Photo: Julian Hughes)