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

Conference: How to Do Things with Art



A conference paper proposal Choreo-graphic Figures: The Notion >< Notation of Figuring (developed in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil as part of the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line) has been accepted for inclusion in the forthcoming conference, How to Do Things with Art, 11 - 13 November 2015, Aarlborg, Denmark.

About the conference: This conference argues that we must account for the intensity of art, otherwise we can only explain part of our aesthetic experience. This argument is found in critics as diverse as Brian Massumi, Charles Altieri, and Sianne Ngai. Philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and Steven Shaviro have argued that much of our perception is not cognitive but intuitive; we connect to the world through our senses. The conference is part of a debate on how to understand our sensory perception of art as part of a larger process. Where most aesthetic and cultural research has focused on matters of meaning, signification, and hermeneutics, this conference asks questions of aisthesis, sensation, and feeling. More than representation, more than form, art is production. New materialisms, affect theories, performativity theories, and actor-network-theories have all shown that the artwork is never passive, never inert. Art produces sensations, new modes of being, new knowledges, and new feelings. Not a matter of rejecting earlier findings, we are simply trying to explore the 'other side' of the experience of art. Cognition and feeling are not distinct but articulated together; their relation changes depending on the specific artwork.

By exploring the sensory experience of art, we can also understand the intersection of art, culture, and politics in new ways. Art produces new subject positions and becomes a doorway to new experiences, new sensations, and new modes of thought. In this way, art expands our world, becoming a motor for cultural and political manifestations. A process-oriented approach to art extends current approaches, revealing that thought, act, and creativity cannot be separated. Instead of observing a distinction between work and subject, process-oriented approaches instead turn to individuation as the mode of becoming, insisting that we are always more than one and art adds to this more than one. Key note speakers: Erin Manning, University Research Chair at Concordia University, Canada; Brian Massumi, Professor at Université de Montréal, Canada; Frederik Tygstrup, Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. 

 Our abstract for the conference can be read below.