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

Publication: Pretentious Writing



Pretentious Writings is interested in the crossing of meanings, how the modes/mediums of processing information and languages affects understanding. Pretentious Writings invited artists working with text or interested in thinking as a form of artistic medium, for sensing in their approaches how the issues of translation, conversion, and meaning formation are embedded into visual strategies. Pretentious Writings has gathered multiple diverse authorial contributions into a non-pretentious publication with a format that is part fanzine, part feel of a gathering of friends.

 André Alves (ed.), Ângelo Ferreira de Sousa, Chris Reeves, Cynthia Gregory, Danielle van Zuijlen, Diego Vites, Eduardo Leitão, Emma Cocker, Francesco Ventrella, Maria Sottomayor, Natalie Calderón, Not-Wolf, Patrick Coyle, Ricardo Castro, Valter Ventura