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

Conference Key-note: Towards an Attitude of Openness (Care | Share | Dare)




I was invited as one of the key-note speakers (alongside Liza Lim and Jyoti Mistry) for the annual Society of Artistic Research conference entitled CARE DARE SHARE. The 12th SAR Conference on Artistic Research of the Society for Artistic Research took place from 7 - 9 April 2021 and was hosted by mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It was oriented on the three attractors ‘care’, ‘dare’ and ‘share’ and is the first SAR conference to be organised as a live online event.

 

My abstract: Towards an Attitude of Openness

Drawing on her experience of collaborative artistic research, writer-artist Emma Cocker will consider the three attractors — dare, care, share — through the connecting thread of openness. How might artistic research invite and encourage (give courage) towards an attitude or orientation of openness — within the process of enquiry and its sharing; towards others and the world; towards the practice of living and of life? ‘Being open’ has manifold meaning — it can mean (a) not shut or closed; (b) having no protecting or concealing cover; (c) carried on in full view; (d) not closely defended by an opponent; (e) not sealed or tied; (f) having interspersed gaps, spaces, or intervals; (g) accessible; (h) free from limitations, boundaries or restrictions; (i) to speak freely and candidly; (j) to open (one’s) eyes, to become aware of the truth of a situation; (k) willing to consider or deal with something; (l) ready to transact business; (m) not yet decided, subject to further thought; (n) characterised by lack of pretense or reserve, frank; (o) free of prejudice, receptive to new ideas and understanding; (p) generous; (q) in operation, live; (r) to undo, to release from a closed or fastened position; (s) to remove obstructions from, clear; (t) to get (something) going, initiate; (u) to make or force an opening or gap in, to break the continuity of; (v) to make more responsive or understanding; (w) to reveal the secrets of, to bare; (x) to modify (one’s stance); (y) to accelerate; (z) susceptible, vulnerable. Explored through the prism of openness, how might the three attractors — dare, care, share — open up conversations on the critical potential of risk, attention and being-with operative within artistic research practice?


A version of my presentation can be found here

More about the conference can be found here