Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Emma's research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ therein. Her practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches, alongside a mode of ‘contiguous writing’ — a way of writing-with that seeks to touch upon rather than being explicitly about. Her writing is 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, 2013; 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.

Presentation: Kairotic Practice


I will be giving a presentation on the 21st March at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, London as part of an event organised by live-coders Thor Magnusson and Alex McleanThe event is an introductory, cross-disciplinary research symposium, with the aim to provide rich context for live coding research, which will include talks by myself, Nick Collins (Reader in Composition, University of Durham) and and Alexandra Cardenas (University of the Arts, Berlin). Full details soon. Register at the event here.

My presentation will draw on my article Live Notation: Reflections on a Kairotic Practice, which will be published very soon in a forthcoming issue of Performance Research. In this article, I develop (amongst other things) the term ‘kairotic coding’ to describe the ‘occasionality’ of live coding, conceiving it as a practice alert to whilst simultaneously intent on developing a language to articulate the live circumstances of its own making. This research forms part of a broader and ongoing enquiry in which I am considering the 'enquiring of the enquiry' or the endeavour of artistic endeavour as a form of technĂ©, a tactical knowledge fusing the principles of mĂȘtis (cunning intelligence) and kairos (opportune timing).