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.

Book launch event: Lemonade everything was so infinite.



Lemonade  everything was so infinite.

Hundred Years Gallery
13 Pearson Street, London E2 8JD

Sunday 15th February 2015,
3.30–6.30pm


The book launch of 
Lemonade  everything was so infinite.
 by David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, Rachel Lois Clapham
 took place on 15th February, Hundred Years Gallery, London.  For the launch, using a variety of apparatuses and improvisational techniques, Douglas Benford, Steve Beresford, Regina Blanca and Manuela Barczewski played a selection of pages of ‘Lemonade  everything was so infinite.’, published by LemonMelon.






Symposium: Threads and Codes


I have been invited to present a paper at the forthcoming, Threads and Codes Symposium, taking place at Goldsmiths, University of London, 10am-6pm, 6th March 2015, 137 Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, New Cross, London SE14 6NW

Background: The Weaving Codes, Coding Weaves project explores the practices of weaving and computer programming together, considering both looms and computers as algorithmic environments for creative work with pattern. The connection between computing and the Jacquard loom is well known, but we want to go deeper in history and philosophy, to investigate traditional work with threads for its digital nature, including the genesis of discrete mathematics in ancient looms. This will provide an unravelling of contemporary technology, finding an alternative account of computer programming with its roots in arts and craft. On this basis this symposium will investigate contemporary theoretical points where textile and code-based crafts connect. This all-day research symposium will consist of talks and panels, co-organised by Dr Ellen Harlizius-Klück (International co-investigator), Dr Alex McLean (principal investigator) and Prof Janis Jefferies (project partner). The results of the symposium will feed into a special issue of Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. The full schedule and booking information will be listed here soon. Weaving Codes, Coding Weaves is a Digital Transformations project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. Confirmed speakers so far:


* Flavia Carraro, Centre for Textile Research, Copenhagen
* Emma Cocker, Nottingham Trent University
* Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Centre for Textile Research, Copenhagen
* Janis Jefferies, Goldsmiths, University of London
* Ebru Kurbak, University of Arts and Industrial Design, Linz
* Alex McLean, University of Leeds
* Simon Yuil, Goldsmiths, University of London
* Theo Wright, Designer and Weaver, Coventry

For more information on the project, see http://kairotic.org/

Presentation: On Not Knowing in Advance: Thinking on/with the Page – Writing’s Emergence


I have been invited by Tine Noergaard, Assoc. Professor & Architect to present a lecture within the context of a seminar programme Critical Written Reflection at the Aarhus School of Architecture

15 April 2015
Aarhus School of Architecture
Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark


My lecture will build on a previous presentation delivered last year within the School of Architecture, entitled On Not Knowing: Writing in Dialogue with, Parallel to and as Practice. Specifically, I want to use this presentation to reflect on my own relation to writing and its emergence, focusing on those forms of written expression where the content or ideas within are not already known or pre-determined in advance, but rather emerge live or synchronous to the situation that they seek to articulate or give expression to, moreover, through a practical working-with of language itself. The lecture will touch on various concerns: on the importance of not knowing and uncertainty within creative practice; on the potentiality of the fragment, distillation and extraction; on poetic language as a mode of thinking with-and-through or for articulation without direct explication; on writing as both a material and temporal practice.
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