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: Dorsal Practices @ SAR



We – Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker – will be presenting a "practice" from our collaborative project, Dorsal Practices, at the forthcoming Society of Artistic Research conference, Too Early/Too Late, in Trondheim, 9-21 April 2023 – see https://sar2023.no/


Abstract: Dorsal Practices

Rather than a mode of withdrawal, of turning one’s back, how might a backwards-leaning orientation support an open, receptive ethics of relation? A back-oriented approach foregrounds the active letting go, releasing, even de-privileging, of habits of uprightness + frontality — the head-oriented, sight-oriented, forward-facing, future-leaning tendencies of a culture intent on grasping a sense of the world through naming + control. How can this tilt — or inclination — towards a receptive dorsal (dis)orientation enable new modes of thinking, perceiving and being-with; more connected, sustainable ways of living and aliveness?

 

Dorsal Practices is an interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographer Katrina Brown + writer-artist Emma Cocker, exploring the notion of dorsality in relation to how we as moving bodies orientate to self, others, world. Since January 2021, Brown + Cocker have investigated the felt experience of a dorsal orientation through body-based, somatic-informed movement scores, followed by a process of conversation on ZOOM for reflecting with-and-through their embodied practising, alongside the poetic-philosophical concepts of the dorsal that arise in this working-with and together. Often undertaken back-to-back (subverting frontal habits of online meeting) the conversations foster sensitive interaction, heightening attention to the experience of listening + being listened to, allowing for an emergent “dorsal voicing”. The ‘conversation’ transcripts are reactivated through a shared experimental reading practice, where fresh insights and understanding emerge in the intersubjective and improvisatory interplay of spoken word, through unexpected conjunctions, (re)combinations, the circling and looping of language.

 

For SAR, Brown + Cocker will reactivate their conversational transcripts through sharing/enacting the experimental reading practice as a live event, in the very moment of voicing creating a ‘new’ and contingent unfolding of dorsal sense-making.

 

Details:

See programme here - https://sar2023.no/program3

Friday, April 21, 2023 - 15:30 – 17.00

OLAVSHALLEN: LILLE SAL