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.

Presentation: On Not Knowing in Advance: Thinking on/with the Page – Writing’s Emergence


I have been invited by Tine Noergaard, Assoc. Professor & Architect to present a lecture within the context of a seminar programme Critical Written Reflection at the Aarhus School of Architecture

15 April 2015
Aarhus School of Architecture
Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark


My lecture will build on a previous presentation delivered last year within the School of Architecture, entitled On Not Knowing: Writing in Dialogue with, Parallel to and as Practice. Specifically, I want to use this presentation to reflect on my own relation to writing and its emergence, focusing on those forms of written expression where the content or ideas within are not already known or pre-determined in advance, but rather emerge live or synchronous to the situation that they seek to articulate or give expression to, moreover, through a practical working-with of language itself. The lecture will touch on various concerns: on the importance of not knowing and uncertainty within creative practice; on the potentiality of the fragment, distillation and extraction; on poetic language as a mode of thinking with-and-through or for articulation without direct explication; on writing as both a material and temporal practice.