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

Event: Language-based Artistic Research @ SAR FORUM



With Lena Séraphin, I am co-hosting a half-day session on Language-based Artistic Research as part of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR) FORUM, Tilburg, Netherlands.

 

About the session: 

Language-based Artistic Research is a new term for an emergent field of artistic research, describing approaches to artistic research that specifically work-with language. The Special Interest Group (SIG) for Language-based Artistic Research was inaugurated in 2019 within the frame of the Research Pavilion #3, Venice, and now comprises an international network of over 500 artistic researchers. This SIG explores how artistic research is undertaken in and through different language-based practices. The intent is not to define or fix what language-based artistic research is but rather to reflect how it is practised in its diversity. This session during the SAR FORUM will introduce the activities of this SIG, providing invitation to the wider community of artistic researchers to become involved. This SIG session during the SAR FORUM will include activations of PRACTICE SHARINGS and presentations from THEMATIC NODES through a combination of live/in-person and pre-recorded contributions.

 

See our programme here: 

More about the overall FORUM programme here.