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

Workshop: Contingent Agencies | Notations, Reflections and Strategies of Display


with: Alex Arteaga, Stephanie Bunn, Emma Cocker, Karmen Franinović, Nikolaus Gansterer, Paul Petritsch & Nicole Six, Frida Robles, Charlotta Ruth.


Between 5 - 9 October 2021, I was an invited contributor to this workshop, Notations, Reflections and Strategies of Display which took place at the Angewandte Performance Laboratory. The workshop was part of the wider research project Contingent Agencies, led by artistic researchers Alex Arteaga and Nikolaus Gansterer. 


About Contingent Agencies: Contingent Agencies is an artistic research project conceived as an inquiry into the subtle, dynamic, complex, and enveloping presences that emerge in given situations for those who inhabit them. These presences are denominated with various terms such as “Stimmungen,” “moods,” or even “places,” or “figures.” In this project we favor the words “atmospheres” and “environments.” More particularly, this project investigates the specific ways in which the actualization of the agencies of single components of a situation (from light to animals, from artifacts to sounds, from matter to vegetation, from traffic to color) conditions the emergence of these comprehensive and senseful presences. Accordingly, atmospheres are considered as coherent networks of phenomena that emerge due to a systemically organized set of intertwined agencies: the capacity of each component of a given situation to transform the presence of the other components and the arising environment. Contingent Agencies aims at investigating this subject matter in a non-reductive way through artistic and aesthetic practices and connecting this inquiry with other processes of research realized through practices developed in the humanities, the social, and the natural sciences.

More about the research project Contingent Agencies here.

My responses to this workshop can be encountered here