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: Weaving Codes | Coding Weaves



From 24 - 29 October I am working at FoAM Kernow in Cornwall with Alex Mclean, Ellen Harlizius-Klück and Dave Griffiths as part of the AHRC Digital Transformations Amplification research project, 'Weaving Codes – Coding Weaves’. This project 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? The research residency included a public performance exploration of weaving and live coding (see documentation below) as well as discussions about a forthcoming special issue of Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture focusing on insights and findings from this project. My role in this project is as a critical witness/interlocutor; reflections from my observations on the project will form part of a research article for the special issue of Textile, elaborating ideas developing within a series of conference presentations around the title 'Live Coding | Weaving : Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder's Kairos.