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 Dialogue: Choreo-ethical Assemblages


Image: Mariella Greil, Choreo-ethical Assemblages

Between 26 - 29 September 2022, I was working as a "dialogue partner" with Mariella Greil at APL (Angewandte Performance Laboratory, Vienna) as part of her artistic research project, Choreo-ethical Assemblages – Narrations of Bare Bodies. 

Choreo-ethical Assemblages – Narrations of Bare Bodies is a research project led by Mariella Greil, in dialogue with international specialists from the fields of Performance, Philosophy and Therapy. With ‘practice as research’ at its heart, Choreo-ethical Assemblages – Narrations of Bare Bodies stages a variety of choreo-ethical, inter-subjective and transdisciplinary encounters and explores the movements, interlinkings and interstices between practice and theory, developing fluency between thinking and doing [...] In expanded time frames dedicated to studio-experiments, an awareness and the skill to sustain inter-relational, choreo-ethical culture grow based on experiences and acts interwoven with dialogic discourse. More on Mariella's project Choreo-ethical Assemblages here.