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.