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

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.