Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. 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?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Conference presentation: No Telos - Tactics of Affirmative Uncertainty,



Danica Maier and I will be presenting a paper at The Crisis Collective! the forthcoming SAR International Conference on Artistic Research 2020 held on 25–28 March 2020 in Bergen, Norway. The Crisis Collective! investigates and discusses the relation between Artistic Research, various notions of collective reality and alternative imaginations. Can Artistic Research - through artistic actions - generate alternative modes of knowledge, art, and reality? Our proposed presentation will contribute to the thematic strand within the conference entitled Hammer and Mirror? The language of artistic research. Artistic research shares its metaphorical language with the language of capitalism, sports, and warfare. Resource. Production. Method. Gain. Challenge. Opposition. Defence. This vocabulary creates a formal context and an imminent agency that might influence the specific Artistic Research undertakings and their potential to intervene into the larger collectives of reflection and discourse.

Abstract: No Telos - Tactics of Affirmative Uncertainty
How can artistic research operate alternatively to the language of capitalism, sports and warfare (modelled on economic efficiency/gain, competition/success, target-hitting/strategic machination)? How can artistic research practices that are non-teleological, atelic or autotelic intervene in and unsettle the outcome-motivated and achievement-driven tendencies of contemporary culture, by cultivating shared practices of experiential becoming and collective being-doing? Reflecting on No Telos (2016>) — a project exploring the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation and not knowing within artistic research-practice — we ask: How can we shift emphasis from goal-oriented productivity towards experimental forms of process-led exploration, subversive playfulness and wilful irresolution? Can we differentiate affirming and debilitating forms of uncertainty and open-endedness, between a not knowing that vectors towards generative exploration and that which paralyses, creates stasis? What role has the practising of creative uncertainty within the uncertain conditions of contemporary life? Towards an ethics of uncertainty — how can an encounter with the unfamiliar and strange(r) operate as a micro-political, ethico-aesthetic practice? The rhetoric of art practice, pedagogy and research often foregrounds not knowing, uncertainty and getting lost — yet how can such principles be taught or practised?  Against the strategic power dynamics of institutionalised research, No Telos embraces Michel de Certeau’s advocacy of everyday ‘tactics’ that invigorate the experiential quality of life lived — aesthetic practices of reading, looking, walking, talking, eating, being-with. Invoking the Latin etymology of ‘mirror’ — mirare: to observe, contemplate, look at, wonder — we ask: How can artistic research not only mirror back (reflect, reveal) the conditions of life as-is, but also reactivate critical curiosity (Paulo Freire), re-engage a capacity for collective attention and imagination?