Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title Not Yet There, Cocker's research focuses on the process of artistic exploration and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ emerging therein; on models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist the pressure of a single, stable position by remaining wilfully unresolved. Her mode of working unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to producing texts parallel to and as art practice. Cocker's recent 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; Reading/Feeling (Affect), 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016.

Events: Writing/Performance


I will be participating in a series of LADA Study Room Sessions (organised by Maddie Costa, Diana Damian and Mary Paterson) that aim to explore, rethink and rename a writing practice that emerges from performance. This writing might be in tension with performance, or in conversation, or might forget it altogether. It is loosely associated with criticism, documentation, poetry and conceptual art, and might be all or none of these things. We don’t have a history for it, although it is rooted in traditions. We don’t have a place for it, although it appears everywhere. We don’t have a name for it, but could christen it with you. The three events, organised in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency, will approach this writing from three directions: How do we write? Who do we write for? What comes next?

Conference Paper: Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos


My conference paper ‘Live Coding/Weaving — Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos’ has been accepted as part of the forthcoming International Conference on Live Coding, hosted by ICSRiM in the School of Music, University of Leeds, UK, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of the Live Coding Research Network. http://iclc.livecodenetwork.org/

 A list of contributors can be found here.

Abstract
Drawing on my experience as a critical interlocutor within the Weaving Codes, Coding Weaves project (2014-2016), in this paper I propose potential points of connection between Ancient weaving and live coding, considering both practices through the prism of the Ancient Greek concept of techné, a species of tactical knowledge combining the principles of mêtis (cunning intelligence) and kairos (opportune timing). Specifically, this enquiry addresses the human qualities of attention, cognitive agility and tactical intelligence activated within both live coding and live weaving, arguing that such practices might have potential as ‘practices of the self’, as a means for cultivating a more critical mode of human agency and subjectivity.

Publication: Twenty Years of MAKE: Back to the Future of Women's Art


My interview with Helen Chadwick, Indifference in Difference has been published in Twenty Years of MAKE: Back to the Future of Women's Art, Maria Walsh, Mo Throp (I.B.Tauris, 2015), which is now available.


During the 1970s, adding 'women's' to 'art' was a powerfully political act. Fuelled by the momentum of the women's liberation movement, artists, art historians, critics and curators began to explore the women's art practice, as distinct from men's, and to challenge its invisibility in the established art world and historical canon. In the 1980s, they continued to creatively critique representations of female sexuality, and in the 1990s, some began to embrace the 'post-feminist' idea of difference and the performance of gender. Throughout this pivotal period, the MAKE magazine offered a unique platform for academics, artists and arts professionals to critically engage with women's art. Though the need to talk about 'women's art' seemed to lose some of its political urgency in the early 2000s, many artists, art historians and art students are now once again explicitly engaging with feminist art histories and art practices as possible models and precedents for resistance. Now is the time to revisit the past, in order to understand and galvanise the energy of the present. Gathering together the work of eminent writers such as Griselda Pollock and Marina Warner, on celebrated artists such as Helen Chadwick, Sarah Lucas and The Guerrilla Girls, this unparalleled anthology of material from the MAKE archive allows us to trace the lineages and links between then and now.

Contributors: Rachel Armstrong | Fiona Barber | Pennina Barnett | Christine Battersby | Monica Bohm-Duchen | Chila Burman | David Burrows | Susan Butler | Deborah Cameron | Helen Chadwick | Janice Cheddie | Laura Cottingham | Marilyn Crabtree | Emma Cocker | Susan Croft | Anna Douglas | Catherine Elwes | Carole Enahoro | Simon Ford | Rebecca Fortnum | Lorraine Gamman | Pam Gerrish Nunn | The Guerrilla Girls | Judith Halberstam | Gill Houghton | Janice Jefferies | Joanna Krysa | Kathy Kubicki | Claire MacDonald | Aoife MacNamara | Rosy Martin | Marsha Meskimmon | Sadie Murdoch | Roxane Permar | Sadie Plant | Griselda Pollock | Nancy Proctor | Shirley Read | Heidi Reitmaier | Hilary Robinson | Paula Smithard | Mo Throp | Yvonne Volkart | Maria Walsh | Marina Warner | Liz Wells | Margaret Whitford | Val Williams | Linda Wilson Green


Workshop Call: Live Coding Alternatives



Live Coding Alternatives Workshop call. Call for position papers and performances as part of Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference, 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus University, Denmark. 
http://www.livecodenetwork.org/live-coding-alternatives/

Organizers:
 Alan Blackwell, Reader in Interdisciplinary Design, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge (UK); Emma Cocker, Reader in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University (UK); Geoff Cox, Associate Professor, Participatory IT research centre, Aarhus University (DK)

Live Coding Alternatives is an interdisciplinary workshop (‘live laboratory’) for testing and exploring live coding as a creative, aesthetic and potentially political practice for constructing ‘critical alternatives’ within both computing and everyday life. The workshop explores this emergent field and aims to open up deeper critical questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. It is structured around live research practices of writing, presentation and performance, collaboratively interrogated through discussion, and the development of critical frameworks that reflect the live coding dynamic. Live Coding Alternatives emphasizes the relation of live coding to the cultivation of ‘alternative’, potentially subversive, ways of operating within contemporary culture. In addition the workshop explores the alternative possibilities offered by live coding practice as able in itself to generate epistemic claims through software development, improvised live performance and ‘artistic research’. The intention is not only to propose how live coding transforms code and coding practice but to investigate the transformational potential inherent within the process of live coding itself. We ask what possibilities for change and action does the practice of live coding suggest? What alternative ways of ‘being operative’ are evoked? We welcome analytical, theoretical and reflective papers from diverse disciplines but especially want to encourage expanded notions of live coding in the form of performances and alternative presentation modes.

Initial areas of interest might include:

* Live coding and performance writing, interplay of text and code, experimental notation practices

* Live coding, its transformative potential and politics

* Live coding, temporality and just-in-time production

* Live coding, alternative epistemologies and artistic research

* Live coding, subjectivity and ‘life’ coding

* Live coding and attribution in reputation economies

* Live coding as the persistent traces of interaction

Position papers will be circulated in advance. Working throughout the day, there will be a critical interlocutor and facilitator, helping excavate and elaborate key ideas connecting live coding to the cultivation of various ‘critical alternatives’. Results of the workshop will be published on the Live Coding Network website.

Important dates:

Call goes live: 02 April

Proposals due: 20 May (email 300 word proposals to gcox@dac.au.dk)

Results made known: 31 May

Workshop: 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus
About Critical Alternatives: 1975-1985-1995-2005 — the decennial Aarhus conferences have traditionally been instrumental for setting new agendas for critically engaged thinking about information technology. The conference series is fundamentally interdisciplinary and emphasizes thinking that is firmly anchored in action, intervention, and scholarly critical practice. In 2015, we see critical alternatives in alignment with utopian principles—that is, the hope that things might not only be different but also radically better. At the same time, radically better alternatives don’t emerge out of nowhere: they emerged from contested analyses of the mundane present and demand both commitment and labor to work towards them. More information here .Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference
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