Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. 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?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Writing/Text: Experiments along the brink of I

"The challenge then, is to figure out a way beyond and through the impossibility of community. This is not to invoke a transcendent plateau from which one will find a new synthetic resolution free of contradictions. Quite the contrary, it is meant to suggest the impossibility of total consolidation, wholeness and unity [...] and perhaps more importantly, to suggest that such an impossibility is a welcome premise upon which a collective artistic praxis, as opposed to a 'community based art' might be theorised', Miwon Kwon, p.154.

"Research should no longer be done off to one side, in a school, a library, a laboratory. Where one lives needs to become a laboratory for researching, for mapping directly, the living body itself, oneself as world-forming inhabitant ... there needs to be a communal devising, selecting and combining of techniques that will strengthen organisms-persons and help them to regenerate themselves; results need to be pooled and compared" Architectural Body, Madeline Gins + Arakawa, pxx

Whilst at the PSi Performing Publics conference in Toronto I was invited to observe the following workshop, with the view to producing a new piece of writing in response for a forthcoming publication. The workshop was led by artists Sara Wookey and Bianca Sclair Mancini and explored the city through various forms of choreographic intervention. Wookey and Sclair Mancini's collaborative practice resonates with many of the concerns that have been developing within my wider practice, especially in relation to my own collaboration with the investigative art project, Open City.


I am tentatively developing a text in response to this work entitled, Experiments Along the Brink of I, where I envisage exploring a number of tactics wherein the distinction between self and other (and indeed world) becomes blurred or folded -  the practices of gleaning gestures, witnessing/attendance, following, flocking, copying, creating synchronicity in rhythm, becoming architectural.

Documentation of 'Movement and the City' workshop