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

Symposium: Another Athens



Space in the City / Space and the City
The Place is the Space / The Space is the Place
Text and the City
4th December / 10am – 5pm /
Forest Centre Plus / 38 Castle Terrace / Edinburgh / EH3 9JD

City as a phantom, a vanishing point, a translucent archipelago.
Another city, unlike any other.
A shadow of a collected thought, a tactile memory constructed in grainy aggregate.

This one-day interdisciplinary symposium invites speakers to investigate the city, its space(s) and how its people interact with it on a daily basis: the city as a score, the imaginary city, strategies of drift and assemblage. The range of speakers, from within and without the arts and literature, will reflect the rich polyphony of views which span experience and interpretation of the city.

The symposium, organised in conjunction with Forest Centre+ & Interview Room 11, is an annexe of the wider project  Another Athens, which is a collaborative multi-platform project that explores the experience of the inhabitants of a city informed by their personal attachment to a place in the context of its intellectual and cultural heritage. The project consists of a text-based collaborative art work that will be translated into both an online interactive structure, and a gallery-based exhibition with building projections, accompanied by an artist film screening, a symposium and an artistic exchange initiative between artists and writers in Edinburgh and Athens, Greece.

LIST OF PRESENTERS: Neil Grey / Yasmin Ali / Gerry Smith / Jane Hyslop / Patty Flint / Nick-e Melville / Emma Cocker / Amir Berbic / Sophia Lycouris / Katalin Hausel / Michael Gallagher / Roselyne Burger / Peter Burnett / Mirja Koponen