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

Event: Performing Process / Embracing Uncertainty

Thursday 23 MARCH 2023

From 18.00 – 22.30

BEAM, Primary Studios, Nottingham 

 

An evening exploring the value of not knowing, uncertainty and failure as generative forces from the perspectives of art and science, exploring tactics for knowing how to not know and for embracing uncertainty during uncertain times. Artistic practice, pedagogy and research often foreground the value of uncertainty and not knowing; are underscored by principles of curiosity and open-endedness, the importance of risk, of trial and error. Yet, how do we know how to not know? Can not knowing and the capacity to embrace uncertainty be taught or even practised? How do we cultivate receptivity to experiences and encounters beyond our zone of habitual comfort? Towards an ethics of uncertainty, how can an encounter with the unfamiliar and strange(r) operate as a micro-political practice that embraces mutual care and reciprocal respect?

 

Join us for an evening of ‘in-conversation’ between writer-artist Emma Cocker and neuroscientist Stuart Firestein exploring ‘embracing uncertainty’, alongside the UK launch of the publication No Telos! with readings and projections. 

 

This event marks the launch a research project called PERFORMING PROCESS as part of the Artistic Research Centre at Nottingham Trent University, co-led by Emma Cocker and Danica Maier, both Associate Professors in Fine Art. PERFORMING PROCESS explores what is at stake in focusing on the process of practice — the embodied, experiential, relational and material dimensions of artistic making, thinking and knowing?

 

Free event but booking required on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/performing-process-embracing-uncertainty-tickets-566642301377

 

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No Telos!

The artists’ publication No Telos! considers different tactics for resisting the increasingly outcome-motivated or achievement-oriented tendencies of contemporary culture, by shifting emphasis from a mode of telos- or goal-driven productivity towards experimental forms of process-led exploration, subversive playfulness and wilful irresolution. This artist's book comprises a series of 'scores' drawing on exercises and practices first developed and tested in Venice. The city is approached as a live laboratory for artistic research. With contributors from Andrew Brown, Emma Cocker, Steve Dutton, Katja Hock, Tracy Mackenna, Danica Maier, Andy Pepper, Elle Reynolds, Derek Sprawson. https://www.beameditions.uk/store/no-telos

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