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: Vitality Gestures and Embodied Diagrammatics






In the midst of ‘gestures of (re)searching’: intense reading-wording-dialoguing-transcribing-discussing-writing. During the Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations of the Line Winter Lab (Vienna, Tanzquartier), we - myself, Mariella Greil and Nikolaus Gansterer - are working together to develop content for a book chapter entitled Choreo-graphic Figures: Vitality Gestures and Embodied Diagrammatics, for inclusion in the forthcoming publication Body Diagrams (eds.) Irene Mittelberg and Alexander Gerner (2017).  The chapter develops from a paper that we presented at the conference Body Diagrams: On the Epistemic Kinetics of Gesture back in 2014. In the first part of this residency, we have been developing ideas (developed in previous labs around the relation of 'figuring' and the 'figure' through reading and discussion. The second phase shifts to the Method lab space (see below) at Tanzquartier where we will continue to explore through practicing together.

Choreo—graphic Figures: Vitality Gestures and Embodied Diagrammatics
Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil
Abstract
Drawing on the artistic research project Choreo—graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 — 2017), this chapter explores how we have practiced a shift within our collaboration from the disciplinary gestures of drawing, writing and choreography towards the aesthetic-epistemological gesture of artistic (re)searching, to give tangible articulation to the pre-gestural register of ‘vitality forces and affects’ (which we call figuring) operating before, between and beneath the more readable gestures of artistic practice. Bringing our practice-as-research into dialogue with theory (including Brandstetter, Flusser, Manning, Massumi, Sabisch, Stern) we reflect on our own attempt to render communicable the dynamic experience of figuring within the creative process, through the production of (choreo—graphic) figures, an expanded system of vitality gestures and embodied diagrammatics.
Key words: aesthetic episteme; attention; embodied diagrammatics; figure; figuring; notation; practice-as-research; praxis; prenoetic; vitality gestures

During this phase of the lab I will be working with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil alongside Lilia Mestre and Werner Mobius, to further develop the vocabulary around Radical Scores of Attention initiated in the Summer Method Lab. We will be presenting some of our work in progress on Saturday 12th December at Tanzquartier, from 1700 - 1900.