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

Lecture and Workshop: Being in the Midst




Emma Cocker, Score Propositions
(Experimental Reading) from No Telos, Venice, 2017
Original photograph: Elle Reynolds

Between 29 - 31 October I will be giving a lecture and leading a 2-day workshop called Being in the Midst: Per-forming Thinking-in-Action, the Kunst Musikk Design Faculty of Arts [kmd] in Bergen, Norway.
Drawing on recent projects, I propose to explore different artistic practices and approaches that are reflexively alert and attentive to the live circumstances – or occasionality - of their own processual production: the thinking-in-action, the kairos of decision-making, the moments of knowing and of not knowing, the navigation of competing forces, of working with and through obstacles or of figuring something out.