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.

Conversation: Uitwaaien



I have been invited to participate in a dialogue with Alice, Annelies De Smet around our shared research interests in how public space is lived and performed, as part of her PhD at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Brussels. Annelies De Smet is interested in “the experience and mapping of transit in public space … in the transit, obstacles, incidents, small interruptions, anecdotes, goalless-ness [...] ”. She encountered my work as part of her project ‘uitwaaien’. Uitwaaien is a Dutch word that cannot be fully translated into English: it literally means 'to walk in the wind' but in the more figurative and commonly used sense it means to take a brief break in the countryside to clear one's head. Below are some stills from her video mapping ‘instance of tongues’ which is based on previous conversations on ‘uitwaaien’. More to follow.

Alice, Annelies De Smet, 'Instance of Tongues'.