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

Symposium: Words and Worlds - Languages and Ecologies

In March 2024, I presented a performative paper as part of the symposium Words and Words: Languages and Ecologies, at Royal Holloway, University of London.

 

About the symposium: The Words and Worlds symposium explored the possibilities of language as an intermediary between humans, plants, animals, and other nonhuman beings. The current ecological crisis brings to the fore how humans, among all other forms of life, are entangled within the biosphere, and several theorists help us to understand the role of human writing culture within that entanglement. Donna Haraway sees human and non-human life bound together in a process of sympoiesis, a conception of becoming-with and creating together that encourages us to make ‘kin’ with all manner of living beings. More about the symposium and related exhibition here.

 

My abstract: Ecologies of Reading

Ecologies of Reading is a language-based artistic research practice involving the improvisatory reading/re-reading of conversational transcript material as an emergent mode of linguistic sense-making. In this performative presentation, I explore how this practice/approach has evolved through the following collaborations: (1) Within Reading on Reading (with Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin) the often-solitary activity of reading becomes transformed into a shared or communal act, as a micro-political or ethico-aesthetic practice through which to re-consider — perhaps even re-organise — the relations between self and other(s), self and world. (2) Dorsal Practices (with Katrina Brown) explores how the tilt or inclination towards dorsal (dis)orientation might enable more connected, sustainable ways of living and aliveness based on the reciprocal, entangled relationship between self/environment. Central to this enquiry is an attempt to explore how different linguistic practices might be developed in fidelity to the embodied experiences of dorsality; how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through this embodied tilt of awareness and attention towards the back. (3) Within thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices (with Alex Arteaga and Nicole Wendel) we have developed various Ecologies in Action (a meshwork of dynamically interconnected aesthetic research practices including experimental reading), that enable and make available modes of aesthetic communication and resonating coexistence between different human and more-than-human agencies. Within each of these collaborations, an immanent mode of linguistic sense-making emerges through the intersubjective and improvisatory interplay of experimental reading and spoken word, where fresh insights and understanding happens through the unexpected conjunctions, (re)combinations, the circling and looping of language.