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

Artists' publication: Above and Beyond



Over the last couple of years, I have been working with artist Rose Butler to develop a collaborative artists’ bookwork which is published this week.

We are told that there is no outside, that to make one’s resistance visible exposes it to control. Still, ways to resist must persist, for the imagining of a future otherwise. Pro-test then — test the system to its limits through the advance of experimental means; cultivate one’s disobedience as an aesthetic practice. Towards a resistant poetics of reorientation — tilt of experience on its axis such that it can be thought anew; radical reorganisation of attention above and beyond the conditions of surveillance and subjugation.

Above and Beyond is a dialogue between artist Rose Butler and writer-artist Emma Cocker reflecting on the interplay between surveillance and resistance; how technologies and techniques of capture might be subverted, transformed into experimental tactics of protest and dissent. The publication was developed through a process of conversation between Butler and Cocker taking place over a number of years (2015—2018), a period marked by substantial political shifts and humanitarian crisis, an unprecedented increase in surveillance and security control.

 This collaborative artists’ publication is conceived in response to  Come and Go (see stills above), a dual screen interactive artwork by Rose Butler that takes Edison’s early films of the Serpentine Dance as its reference with the dance phrases filmed from above.

Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rose Butler
Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emma Cocker
Choreographer . . . . . Alexander Whitley
Dancer . . . . . . . . . . . . . Natalie Allen
Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joff and Ollie



Research Event: Translation Zone(s): A Constellation exhibition




With artist Clare Thornton, I will be showing a video work from our collaboration The Italic I as part of Translation Zone(s): Constellations, a programme of events curated by artist Heather Connelly within the frame of the 8th International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) Conference in Hong Kong. More about the project here.

 The Italic I is a collaborative art project that explores the performed event of surrendering to a repeated fall, slowed and extended through language and the lens. This enquiry focuses on the specificity of experience communicable in the translation of performance through its documents, both photographic and linguistic by asking: How do we translate the experiential nature of falling rather than documenting it only as a visual event? How can we develop a mode of linguistic expression — a mode of poetic textual translation — that embodies rather than describes the live experience that it seeks to articulate?

Translation Zone(s): Constellations is the collective term for the physical ‘zones’ or spatial configurations that Connelly devises to expand research into art-and-translation. These nomadic, multipurpose pop up project spaces, events and exhibitions foster a hospitable environment for interdisciplinary and transcultural research and seek to create the conditions for artists, academics and others to critically engage in the topic, participate and engage in activities, events and discussions that focus on the topic. The format and form of each zone/constellation is determined by its particular context, site, audience, themes, purpose and research questions that it is seeks to examine.

The exhibition includes work from established and emerging artists, curators, writers and researchers Bill Aitchison (UK/CN), Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton (UK), Heather Connelly (UK), Johanna Hällsten (SE/UK), Saskia Holmkvist (SE/NO), Rebecca Johnson (UK), Xiangyun Lim (SG), Marianna Maruyama (NL), Manuela Perteghella (IT/UK) and Ricarda Vidal (DE/UK), Annie Xu (CN/UK) and Solomon Yu, Jimmy Chan and Eddie Cheung (HK).

 Translation Zone(s): Constellations, Hong Kong will be hosted by the 8th International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) Conference theme is Translation and Cultural Mobility , Hong Kong Baptist University (3 - 6th July 2018). This programme of events/exhibition has been designed to compliment and expand the Exploring Cultural Mobility through Visual and Performance Art panel convened by Gabriela Saldanha (University of Birmingham) and Cristina Marinetti (Cardiff University).

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