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.

Exhibition: An Exhibition of a Study on Knowledge

An Exhibition of a Study on Knowledge

Opening Event: 13th April 2012: Lecture Performance 'Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis' with Emma Cocker and Nikolaus Gansterer. Artists: Rossella Biscotti, Marjolijn Dijkman, Nikolaus Gansterer, Toril Johannessen, Pilvi Takala, Haegue Yang, Gernot Wieland

The knowledge society, designed for livelong learning, serves as foundation of the present capitalist order, cognitive capitalism, which foregrounds multiplicity evoked through cognitive work in knowledge economies. Here knowledge is not longer a tool but becomes the actual ‘product’. Such to a large extent interdisciplinary functioning economies involve a broad range of specialists: economists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, geographers, chemists and physicists, as well as cognitivists, psychologists or sociologists. For the knowledge flows they generate, livelong learning, prescient education and communication are increasingly fundamental. Currently, we witness how education stratifies societies and plays an important role in the class struggles in schools and universities. Self-learning methods are becoming increasingly significant as precarious developments in the public education and fields knowledge-production have lead to privatization of knowledge as well as restricted access to education. The exhibition itself as a study brings together a group of international artists in the midst of current changes of the production and position of knowledge. Their artistic practices expand on other domains of critical thinking to bring out scientific, statistical, discursive, empirical, playful or artistic perspectives on knowledge. Aiming at an encapsulation of ephemerality (knowledge), the exhibition will enhance the position of an investigation at large, than a mere display of conceptual objects.

Curated by: Margit Neuhold and Fatos Ustek 
Forum Stadtpark Graz:
Opening: Friday, April 13, 2012. 6:00 pm
Duration: 14. 4. – 12. 5. 2012
Part of the festival: aktuelle Kunst in Graz: 4. – 6. 5. 2012