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.

Project: Walking from Scores


Postcard No.5 - a text work from my collaboration with Open City (Andrew Brown, Katie Doubleday, Simone Kenyon - and originally commissioned as part of NottDance'07) is going to be included as part of a project entitled Walking from Scores by Elena Biserna.



Walking from Scores is a collection of old and newly commissioned scores and sets of instructions by artists involving walking, listening and sounding in urban space. Starting from Biserna’s ongoing investigation on the relationship between expanded sound and the everyday sphere, the projects focuses on artists' scores – conceived as catalysts for action following the tradition of Fluxus event scores – and on walking and moving – conceived as a way to establish a dialectical relation with the everyday and the context. The title is an appropriation of Ken Friedman's text Working from Scores, originally published in 1990. In this text, Friedman introduced his notion of “musicality” in visual art and intermedia, interrogating ideas of “authenticity”, “intention” and “meaning” and understanding the artwork as a set of instructions that allows a constellation of different interpretations. Embracing this open approach, the project consists in a scattered intervention in the 3-day long event Catacomb Bomb curated by Xing in several venues in Bologna. Scores and instructions by: G. Douglas Barrett, George Brecht, Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Chase, Hugh Davies, Bill Diez, Francesco Gagliardi, Christopher Hobbs, Dennis Johnson, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, La Monte Young, Max Neuhaus, Paoline Oliveros, Michael Parson, Ben Patterson, Mark So, Davide Tidoni, Wolf Vostell (& more to be confirmed).