Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. 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?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Lectures: Being in the Midst - Approaches to Language-based Artistic Research

On the 8 May 2023, I gave a lecture to MFA students at UniArts, Helsinki, called Towards the Not-Yet-Known: Writing as an Artistic Research Practice. In this talk, I explored different ways of writing from the site of practice, writing as practice. Towards a mode of writing the not-yet-known, where content is not already known in advance, but rather emerges through the material and poetic process of working-with language. 

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In June 2023, I was invited as a guest speaker to talk about language-based artistic research (especially through the lens of embodied practices) within the frame of the EU4ART differences project. Drawing on some of my recent collaborations, in my lecture Being in the Midst: An Approach to Language-based Artistic Research, I explored different performative, process-orientated and embodied approaches to working with and through language, sharing my evolving approach to language-based artistic research. EU4ART differences is supported by Horizon2020’s SWAF (Science with and for Society) programme. The EU4ART alliance comprises art academies in Riga, Rome, Budapest, and Dresden. A recording of the session can be found here.