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

Project: Simultaneous Arrivals


During April 2023, I will be in Austria contributing to the research project, Simultaneous Arrivals, which is led by sound and digital artists Hanns Holger Rutz (KUG Graz and GMPU Klagenfurt), installation artist Nayarí Castillo and architectural researcher Franziska Hederer (ISD, TU Graz). Across the project, they are working with invited artists-researchers, including myself as a ‘guest advisor’.

 

About the project: Simultaneous Arrivals is an artistic research project on novel forms of collaborative practices within the FWF framework PEEK (AR 714-G), running from 2022 until 2025. The past decades saw growing entanglement, simultaneity and proximity within a networked world, announcing spatio-temporal changes. Global instabilities demand new practices of sharing responsibilities. Despite a rich history of collaborative practices, artist-researchers still work mostly isolated in their core capacity in the arts and through the arts. Transformative practices such as relaying (Stengers) and a singularly plural conception of being (Nancy) are interrogated as ways-of-doing in artistic research. The project joins artists using spatial practices (installation, sound and new media art) with a perceptual exploration of spatiality, questioning it to look at the background from which one arrives in and orientates within a space (Ahmed). The project posits a novel mode of collaborative artistic process based on simultaneity and spatiality. They act as ‘basic’ or ‘boundary’ concepts that complementarily guide artists working together, preserving diversity and individuality among the group, while binding the process as a whole and bridging boundaries between different practices. The project designs methods that facilitate contact among the concurrent artistic processes and understand how these concepts affect them. What are reference frames that allow to establish a “togetherness, at the same time”, and how do different types of spaces—thought spaces, aesthetic spaces, architectural spaces—and their corresponding modes of spatiality interact and interfere? See https://simularr.net/