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 Enquiry: thinking aesthetic thinking

This is an emergent thematic node (within the frame of the SAR SIG Language-based Artistic Research) initiated by Alex Arteaga and Emma Cocker, to inquire into one specific variety of thinking: "aesthetic thinking". Based on previous investigations, this enquiry starts with the hypothesis that aesthetic thinking is enabled through an intensification of sensorimotor and emotional skills and a temporary neutralisation of will-based, target-oriented and logical-constructive actions. Furthermore, we believe that aesthetic thinking unfolds within emerging networks of non-hierarchically distributed agencies and does not produce or consolidate but rather destabilises meaning.

We intend to investigate how language-based artistic research practices may on the one hand trigger, sustain and nurture aesthetic thinking and, on the other hand, enable intuitive evidences of this variety of sense-making to appear. On this basis, we envisage to research as well the relationships between aesthetic thinking and discursive-propositional thinking, a hegemonic modality of meaning-making in the medium of language. We propose to carry on this research on the methodological basis of "ecologies of research practices in action": the mobilisation of connected, intertwined and hybridised practices in the medium of language. The collective activation of practices of reading, transcribing, translating, voicing, writing, distributing, printing, projecting, showing and sharing language in the form of "ecologies" is meant here to realise—meaning simultaneously fulfil and achieve insights—aesthetic thinking.