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

Performance Lecture + Workshop: Choreo-graphic Figures, Berlin


8 + 9 June 2018
SALON FÜR ÄSTHETISCHE EXPERIMENTE - SPECIAL:
Performance Lecture + Workshop

How can we attend to the process of artistic sense-making from within or inside, that affective realm of energies, emergences and intensities operat­ing before, between, and below the more readable ges­tures of artistic practice? How can we develop systems of notation and performativity for sharing this often hidden or undisclosed aspect of the creative process, for communicating the experience with others?

Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line is an artistic research project involving key researchers writer-artist Emma Cocker, artist-performer Nikolaus Gansterer and dancer-choreographer Mariella Greil, working with others including interlocutor Alex Arteaga. In this performance lecture at Salon für Ästhetische Experimente, the researchers draw on their publication Choreo-graphic Figures as a ‘score’, performing their findings and reflections as live event. An interdisciplinary workshop will give deeper insight into Choreo-graphic Figures, introducing practices of attention, conversation and notation for making tangible the barely perceptible micro-movements at the cusp of awareness within artistic process.
Performance Lecture: 8 June 2018, 6.00 – 9.00 pm, Universität der Künste, Room 101 (Alte Bibliothek), Hardenbergstraße 33, 10623 Berlin.

Workshop: 9 June 2018, 1.00 - 5.00pm, HZT - Hochschulzentrum Tanz, Uferstudios, Studio 11, Uferstraße 8/23, 13357 Berlin. Admission free.

The Salon für Ästhetische Experimente is a cooperation with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and co-funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin.


Event: Reading as a ‘Critical Poetic’ Practice


Reading as a ‘Critical Poetic’ Practice
Critical Poetics Reading Group
23 May 2018: 5.30 – 7.00
Nottingham Trent University


Image: from Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, an artistic research project with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil

Taking its point of departure from Michelle Boulous Walker’s Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution and Georges Perec’s ‘Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline’, this reading group will explore: What might a ‘critical poetic’ mode of reading look/feel like? What kinds of (alternative) knowledge or ‘sense making’ are produced through experimental practices of reading? The intent is to consider the relations between reading and slowness through an experimental, experiential approach.

Different methods of reading can generate different registers of affect; there is scope for testing experimental tactics. Texts do not always need to be read in a linear or logical way, but rather can be dipped into, allowing for detours and distractions. A single sentence might open in one book, close in another. Certain sections are lingered over, whilst others skimmed past. Reading is not bound by the chronology of a text’s unfolding. Attention can be activated mid-sentence or half way down a page. Words are sonorous as much as signifying units; the soundness of a text tested by tongue and lips as much as by the mind. Certain language must be rolled in the mouth before it can be fully digested. Texts resonate at different frequencies according to their enunciation. New meanings are revealed by changed inflection, in the pauses and durations breathed between the words.  (Emma Cocker, fragments from ‘Reading Towards Becoming Causal’, in Reading/Feeling: Affect Reader, If I Can’t Dance … 2013)


Visual Poetry Anthology: Synapse Internation



Edited by Karl Kempton, Synapse International is an online visual-text-art-blog-anthology that contains visual poetry, minimalist poetry, book art, mail art, word painting, contemporary calligraphy, word sculpture, visual-text-centered collage, visual-text-centered photography, mathematical poetry. The purpose is to provide the best possible works to a world audience...and start dialogue.

My work was selected for inclusion in A CONSTELLATION OF EUROPE, the first Guest editor Philip Davenport. This issue of the anthology features work by: nick-e Melville; Bruno Neiva; Kristin Mueller; Bárbara Mesquita; Bruno Ministro; Darren Marsh; Anatol Knotek; Mikko Kuorinki; Sarah Eliza Kelly; Piotr Kalisz; Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim; Steve Giasson, a European; Thomas Geiger; Romain Gandolphe; Philip Davenport; Erkembode; Matt Dalby; James Davies; Emma Cocker; Paula Claire; Ana Cancela; Kimberly Campanello; Leanne Bridgewater; Zeynep Cansu Başeren; arthur+Martha; Guillaume Apollonaire; P.S. ABC; Eric Zboya; Orban, Victor: a portrait; Bilyk, Volodymyr – Володимир Білик; Martijn in ‘t Veld; seekers of lice; Tony Trehy; Miron Tee; Riiko Sakkinen; Jörg Piringer; Stephen Nelson; Camilla Nelson; Liliane Lijn

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