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 Paper: Performing Thinking in Action: The Meletē of Live Coding


My paper Performing Thinking in Action:The Meletē of Live Coding has been accepted for inclusion in the forthcoming second International Conference on Live Coding 2016 (ICLC 2016), will take place at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada from October 12th to October 15th, 2016. My paper elaborates ideas which I am developing for an article of the same title for a Special Issue of the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media (Issue 12.2, October 2016), which will focus on Live Coding in Performance Arts. Concerns explored in the paper will also be developed further through my involvement in co-authoring the first book length academic publication addressing Live Coding, Live coding - a user's manual, with Alan Blackwell, Professor, Interdisciplinary Design, University of Cambridge; Geoff Cox, Associate Professor, Department of Aesthetics, Aarhus University; Alex McLean, Research Fellow, Scientific Research in Music, Leeds University; Thor Magnusson, Lecturer in Music, University of Sussex.

Abstract
This paper interprets live coding as a dynamic model of ‘performing thinking’ in action and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’. Underpinned by the principle of performing its thinking through ‘showing the screen’, live coding ‘makes visible’ the process of its own unfolding through the public sharing of live decision-making within improvisatory performance practice, emphasizing the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening (live). The making visible of thinking ‘in action’ has epistemological import, shedding light on the nature of knowledge production and mode of intelligence operative therein, generating insights into this habitually unseen aspect of creative endeavour. Live coding can also be conceived as the performing of ‘thinking in action’, a live, embodied navigation of various critical thresholds, affordances and restraints: for working with elective rules/restraints as critical leverage; testing the relation between receptivity and spontaneity, between an immersive flow experience and split-attention, human and machine, the known and not yet known.



Talk: Writing Movement / Reading Movement


Spike Island artist in residence Tamarin Norwood invites dancer and performance artist Martina Conti, writer-artist Emma Cocker and writer and singer Phil Owen to join her in conversation. Building upon insights from their own interdisciplinary methods, they will explore the liveness and 'timeliness' of action and notation across drawing, writing and choreography. This event is part of Point Line Time, a drawing research project led by artist and writer Tamarin Norwood as part of her twelve-month residency at Spike Island, Bristol. Throughout her residency, Norwood is working with a network of researchers and practitioners including an animator, a 3D print engineer, a choreographer and a sign language translator to explore the acts of drawing and writing in relation to time and three-dimensional space. She hosts a series of public conversations, presentations and live experiments as she develops a new body of work. More about the event here.
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