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

Research activity: Collaborative Writing in Public Space

Between 11 – 16 April, I will be in Paris with Andrea Coyotzi Borja and Lena Séraphin, undertaking research activities linked to the project, transitory writing in no one’s lands. With a conceptual anchor in Georges Perec’s short book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975/2010), this project explores how the relational aspects of collective writing and the formation of shared spaces of attention might create conditions for the emergence of inclusive in-between spaces or no one’s lands. It sets out to activate temporary communities and inclusive in-between spaces through a series of workshops for testing new practices of situated writing.



Whilst in Paris, we will engage in three days of writing in Place Saint-Sulpice, echoing the three days of writing in the square that Perec presents in his An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. On the 15 April 2024, we - Emma, Lena, and Andrea - will be part of a ‘round table event’, hosted by Neli Dobreva (Lecturer in Philosophy of art and Aethetics) to present and discuss the research project transitory writing in no one’s land at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris in co-operation with University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.


The “unfinished becoming” of “transitional writing”

April 15 | Round table organized as part of the “Arts & SHS” program

MONDAY 15 April 2024, 10:00 – 13.00

As part of the Arts & SHS program , in collaboration with the Sorbonne School of Arts, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

 

The “unfinished becoming” of “transitional writing” or what are the spaces that emerge by writing jointly? The main question posed by the project is: “how can language and writing have an inter-subjective potential? ". This research proposal considers artistic research writing as both an aesthetic and research practice forming an experiential knowledge. Through ephemeral writing and with the ambition to question the space that propagates and expands with joint writing, this project seeks to know how collective writing can open and initiate (new) spaces of engagement. More here.