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.

Reflections: Weaving/Coding



Productive few days of working and reflection in the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke in Munich with Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Dave Griffiths and Alex McLean, as part of the project Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves. Whilst paying attention to the work and dialogue between Ellen, Dave and Alex, the context for the museum also provided a critical context in itself for reflecting on the project (including through a form of visual/photographic note-taking which will be returned to as provocation for future writing). Above, Penelope (the weaver) and Artemis/Diana (the hunter/archer) - in close proximity in the museum. A kairotic connection perhaps? Kairos has origins in two different sources: archery, where as Eric Charles White notes, it describes “an opening or ‘opportunity’ or, more precisely, a long tunnel like aperture through which the archer’s arrow has to pass”, and weaving where there is “a ‘critical time’ when the weaver must draw the yarn through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp of the cloth being woven” (Eric Charles White, 1987. Kaironomia: On the Will to Invent. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London: 13).

 The experience of being in the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke provided a context for thinking through the ideas related to the Weaving Codes/Coding Weaves (specifically in relation to Penelopean labour) from a different perspective, through the provocation of various encounters therein (some examples of encounter below) which offered a very particular prism for reflection. Ideas of live coding/weaving to manual dexterity (or loss thereof); different modalities of sense-making (embracing tactility, temporality, embodied experience, perhaps even the politics and poetics of écriture féminine); the relation between weaving/unweaving to folding/unfolding/refolding; reversibility and also irreversibility; the notion of the version (as a site of repetition or iteration but with variation, the possibility of different inflection); the relation between cuts and continuities in notation (discontinuous and continuous systems for describing both the experience of coding and of weaving); practices for 'making tangible' the hidden or invisible, the immaterial or seemingly virtual, through the spatialisation of process as well as attending to the nature of its temporality  .... more to follow. 



Visual 'note-taking' in the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke

 From my recent paper 'Live Coding / Weaving - Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos', "I think of Luce Irigaray when she says, “one must listen differently in order to hear an other meaning which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed immobilised” (Irigaray 1980: 103). A Penelopean labour - doing and undoing - but not the repetitive practice of sameness, but rather one of attending to difference, to the potential twists, variations and permutations of the thread or code. Here, a ‘doing-undoing-redoing’ perhaps akin to the Deleuzian conceptualization of a plier/déplier/replier, where the act of folding, unfolding and refolding “no longer simply means tension-release, contraction-dilation, but enveloping-developing, involution-evolution” (Deleuze 2006: 9).


 Below is a draft version of my paper, 'Live Coding / Weaving - Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos'. An initial version of this paper was presented at the Threads and Codes symposium. This current version will be presented at the International Conference on Live Coding, 13 - 15 July 2015, University of Leeds, UK. ICLC is the first 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/

Conference paper: Kairos Time: The Performativity of Timing and Timeliness … or; Between Biding One’s Time and Knowing When to Act


My paper entitled ‘Kairos Time: The Performativity of Timing and Timeliness … or; Between Biding One’s Time and Knowing When to Act’ has been accepted for inclusion in the 1st PARSE Biennial Research Conference on TIME at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden (4 – 6 November 2015). 


About the conference: Time arguably has always been at the center of the research initiatives of the natural sciences, of philosophy and of the many different practices of history and social criticism. However, time also occupies a central place for the curiosity and attention of artist researchers across all the arts. The intensification of the question of time has, in recent years, prompted some to speak of a “temporal turn” across the disciplines. This conference seeks to bring together a range of researchers, drawn mainly from the artistic fields but also inviting researchers from across all disciplines to consider questions with respect to the practices, processes and perturbations of time. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: constructions of contemporaneity; time and the aesthetic; time and affect; gendered time; queer times; chronophobia; chronopolitics; chronotopes; durational practices; public time; network time; the time of the gift; globalization, instantaneity and temporal collapse; the nostalgia of capital; the time thinking of sustainability; temporal imaginaries and ecological practices; the time of the political; labour time and forms of life; the time of the poem; afternarrative time; empire time; revolutionary time; dead-time; end-time; out-of-time; behind-the-times, and again next time.

Abstract: ‘Kairos Time: The Performativity of Timing and Timeliness … or; Between Biding One’s Time and Knowing When to Act’: This paper investigates contemporary performance & artistic practice through the prism of kairos, a concept that in spite of the ‘temporal turn’ within arts/humanities - & its familiarity within literary/rhetorical studies - has remained relatively under-interrogated in relation to artistic processes of making/thinking. Drawing Antonio Negri’s writing on the ‘revolutionary time’ of kairos (alongside Henri Bergson’s concept of the ‘gap’ or interval) into dialogue with Ancient Greek rhetoric, my intent is to elaborate the significance of kairos to contemporary art practice and critical imagination, identifying various artistic practices (including ‘live notation’, ‘live coding’, performative drawing) that operate as contemporary manifestations of Ancient technē, or analogously to Negri’s ‘poet’: practices alert/attentive to the live circumstances or ‘occasionality’ of their own making, based on kairotic principles of immanence, intervention & invention-in-the-middle.
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