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.

Publication: Hives, Tribes, Assemblages: New Collectivities

My essay ‘R.S.V.P. Choreographing Collectivity through Invitation and Response’ has been accepted for a forthcoming issue of the online journal Rhizomes, entitled Hives, Tribes, Assemblages: New Collectivities.

Hives, Tribes, Assemblages: New Collectivities
In introducing A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari famously quipped: "The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd." And matters only get more congested as their mental geography unfolds among landscapes traversed by herds, swarms, bands, gangs, hoards, flocks, packs, masses and multiple other collective becomings. This special issue of Rhizomes invites essays and multimodal works that consider new manifestations of and approaches to collectively, community or other multiplicities—whether inspired by Deleuze & Guattari or not. Topics might include: intentional (or unintentional) communities; queer convergences; revolutionary congregations; posthuman aggregations; cross-species collaborations; symbiogeneses; collective intelligence; fan groups and other bolos of shared enthusiasms; flash mobs; clown armies; temporary activist assemblies; sleeper cells; conspiracies and other collective panic attacks; lodges; covens; communes; clubs; colonies; coalitions; digital swarms; tribalisms; hive minds; distributed contagions; panarchies; new ecological assemblages.
Background to Rhizomes journal
Rhizomes oppose the idea that knowledge must grow in a tree structure from previously accepted ideas. New thinking need not follow established patterns. Rhizomes promotes experimental work located outside current disciplines, work that has no proper location.