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

Research: Convocation - On Expanded Language-based Practices


16 – 18 June 2019
10.00 – 20.00
Research Pavilion
Sala del Camino + theatre
Giudecca, Venice
http://www.researchpavilion.fi/

Convocation – a call to come together, a gathering of expanded language-based practices. Curated and hosted by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin in co-operation with Alex Arteaga. A collaboration between research cells Through Phenomena Themselves, Disruptive Processes and AIRA, within the frame of the Research Pavilion, Venice.

Convocation – from com ‘with, together’ and vocare ‘to call’. We call for a gathering of language-based practices: from the wordless corporeality of body language to the virtuality of digital text, from the voicing of spoken utterance to the textility of words on a page. Textorium – a notion that etymologically pertains to weaving and braiding, the weaver and the woven. For phenomenologist Max van Manen the term refers to the writerly space of reflection, the experiential world of the text as it opens up for the receptive writer and reader. But how can the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of language be put into question? How can language-based practices enable us to encounter ‘things’ anew? From textorium to sensorium, a reciprocal space for coming together through a material encounter with language experienced in its diversity.

How do we experience language’s activity, affectivity, ambiguity, capacity, corporeality, density, elasticity, ephemerality, fluidity, fragility, illegibility, instability, intensity, inter-subjectivity, hybridity, materiality, multiplicity, musicality, occasionality, opacity, performativity, physicality, plasticity, porosity, potentiality, relationality, simultaneity, sensibility, sensitivity, sonority, spatiality, syn­chronicity, tonality, temporality, visuality, vitality?

Convocation invites exploration of the how-ness of language within practices of: Addressing | Calling | Conversing | Describing | Dialoguing | Disrupting | Drawing | Echoing | Effacing | Evoking | Fictioning | Invoking | Listening | Misunderstanding | Moving | Muting | Naming | Questioning | Reading | Redacting | Spacing | Speaking | Summoning | Transcribing | Translating | Voicing | Wording | Writing | ____ ing

Weaving between artistic research and phenomenological approaches, this 3-day event will include open workshops, live research, collective writing/reading exercises, and performative lectures. Participants can attend for the whole 3-day event or just for specific sessions.


Publication + book launch: No Telos



No Telos is a collaborative artistic research project for exploring the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within creative practice and during uncertain times. This artists’ book comprises a series of ‘scores’ drawing on exercises and practices first developed and tested in Venice (2017), where the city is approached as a working ground or live laboratory for artistic research and aesthetic investigation, for poetic inscription and playful experimentation. Contributing artists: Andrew Brown | Emma Cocker | Steve Dutton | Katja Hock | Tracy Mackenna| Danica Maier | Andy Pepper | Elle Reynolds | Derek Sprawson.






 No Telos considers different tactics for resisting the increasingly outcome-motivated or achievement-oriented tendencies of contemporary culture, by shifting emphasis from a mode of telos or goal-driven productivity towards experimental forms of process-led exploration, subversive playfulness and wilful irresolution. No Telos was conceived as a counter-measure to the ubiquitous demands to do more and more — faster and faster — that arguably underpin the current culture of immediacy and urgency, with its privileging of multitasking, perpetual readiness and ‘just-in-time’ production. No Telos was adopted as a (mis)guiding principle through which to collectively test and develop shared ways of doing and becoming — for producing generative states of uncertainty; for exploring the disruptive potential within incompletion and the unresolved; for cultivating receptivity to the unfamiliar and unexpected, to the possibility of the unknown.

 Book Launch
Sunday 16 June, 18:00 - 20:00
Research Pavilion
Sala del Camino
Giudecca
Venice


In Conversation: with Belén Cerezo




On Saturday 25 May (1.00 – 2.00), I will be ‘in conversation’ with artist Belén Cerezo as part of her current OPEM residency in The Collection, Lincoln.

Belén Cerezo produces videos, photographs, writings and moving-image installations and she is interested in examining the functioning of images. During this residency she will explore the boundaries between 'looking at' and 'being in' through an on-going installation. The starting point for this testing is the story ‘The Egg and the Chicken’ by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector that will be used also to analyse the process and methodology for making a new work.

Symposium: Algomech - On Dancing and Braiding





SYMPOSIUM
On Dancing and Braiding
10am-5pm, Fri 17 May 2019
Site Gallery

I will be chairing a session called ‘Threads and technologies on the move’ as part of the Algomech festival, which builds on my recent interlocutory experience within the AHRC funded Weaving Codes | Coding Weaves project.

Launching AlgoMech Festival, an interdisciplinary symposium bringing together perspectives from digital media, choreography & dance technology, traditional Andean and Ancient Greek textiles, e-textiles, philology, live coding and architecture. Through talks, discussion and performance, contributors to the symposium will consider their work in the context of interlacing within and between textiles, e-textiles, pattern, structure and movement, including dance. Interfaces between materials, craft technologies, digital engineering, responsive systems, embodied communications, threads, inter-weaving, intertwining, braiding and building will provide a rich vein of dialogue, experimentation and recent practice-led outcomes.

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