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

Colloquium Key-note: Uncertain Knowledge(s)

Uncertain Knowledge(s)

7th July 2021


I was invited as the key-note speaker for the colloquium Uncertain knowledge(s) organised by the Material Encounters research group at Birmingham City University| 7th July 2021

 

My abstract: Tactics for Preparing for the Unexpected 

By attending closely to the unfolding of artistic process, how might we go beyond the rhetoric of ‘not knowing’ towards a more nuanced understanding of the uncertain knowledge(s) generated in and through artistic research? How is an encounter with the unknown or unforeseen activated within the doing of artistic research, conceived as a co-constitutive, co-emergent process of collaboration between human and non-human forces and agencies? Rather than seeking to control or steer the research process towards a specific telos or outcome, how might the artist-researcher cultivate an attitude of openness, receptivity towards the unplanned for, that which cannot be anticipated in advance? How does the artist-researcher prepare for the unexpected? 

 

A version of my presentation can be encountered here

 

About the colloquium:

“The concept of material thinking offers us a way of considering the relations that take place within the very process or tissue of making. In this conception, the materials are not just passive objects to be used instrumentally by the artist, but rather, the materials and processes of production have their own intelligence that come into play in interaction with the artist's creative intelligence”, Bolt, B (2010), The Magic is in the Handling. In: E, Barrett, & B. Bolt, eds. Practice As Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. London: I. B. Tauris & Company, pp.29-30.

 

An artist’s working process is a hidden yet significant journey: it is where ambiguous and uncertain knowledge(s) are given the opportunity to be discovered through materiality and encounter. The artist’s process itself is also a highly valuable practice of research, actively enabling new yet potentially slippery knowledge(s) to emerge through reflection, the synthesis of ideas and the unknown. This one-day colloquium seeks to provoke dialogues across practices to examine the possibilities and unknowns of process and matter as a critical meeting point between thought, intention, and the expectance of what might transpire. What happens when the outcome is not the goal? How can we conceptualise and capture the flux of artistic practice as research? Can the artmaking process that is unformulated, communicate research beyond words? Contributions from artists, researchers and all those in/between were invited that explore themes that include but are not limited to: Disruption; Im)materiality; Uncertainty and ambiguity; Material epistemologies; Risk, failure and the accidental; Process and the (un)finished work; The act of making and production.

 

More about the colloquium here