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. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. 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; 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.

Workshop Call: Live Coding Alternatives



Live Coding Alternatives Workshop call. Call for position papers and performances as part of Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference, 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus University, Denmark. 
http://www.livecodenetwork.org/live-coding-alternatives/

Organizers:
 Alan Blackwell, Reader in Interdisciplinary Design, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge (UK); Emma Cocker, Reader in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University (UK); Geoff Cox, Associate Professor, Participatory IT research centre, Aarhus University (DK)

Live Coding Alternatives is an interdisciplinary workshop (‘live laboratory’) for testing and exploring live coding as a creative, aesthetic and potentially political practice for constructing ‘critical alternatives’ within both computing and everyday life. The workshop explores this emergent field and aims to open up deeper critical questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. It is structured around live research practices of writing, presentation and performance, collaboratively interrogated through discussion, and the development of critical frameworks that reflect the live coding dynamic. Live Coding Alternatives emphasizes the relation of live coding to the cultivation of ‘alternative’, potentially subversive, ways of operating within contemporary culture. In addition the workshop explores the alternative possibilities offered by live coding practice as able in itself to generate epistemic claims through software development, improvised live performance and ‘artistic research’. The intention is not only to propose how live coding transforms code and coding practice but to investigate the transformational potential inherent within the process of live coding itself. We ask what possibilities for change and action does the practice of live coding suggest? What alternative ways of ‘being operative’ are evoked? We welcome analytical, theoretical and reflective papers from diverse disciplines but especially want to encourage expanded notions of live coding in the form of performances and alternative presentation modes.

Initial areas of interest might include:

* Live coding and performance writing, interplay of text and code, experimental notation practices

* Live coding, its transformative potential and politics

* Live coding, temporality and just-in-time production

* Live coding, alternative epistemologies and artistic research

* Live coding, subjectivity and ‘life’ coding

* Live coding and attribution in reputation economies

* Live coding as the persistent traces of interaction

Position papers will be circulated in advance. Working throughout the day, there will be a critical interlocutor and facilitator, helping excavate and elaborate key ideas connecting live coding to the cultivation of various ‘critical alternatives’. Results of the workshop will be published on the Live Coding Network website.

Important dates:

Call goes live: 02 April

Proposals due: 20 May (email 300 word proposals to gcox@dac.au.dk)

Results made known: 31 May

Workshop: 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus


About Critical Alternatives: 1975-1985-1995-2005 — the decennial Aarhus conferences have traditionally been instrumental for setting new agendas for critically engaged thinking about information technology. The conference series is fundamentally interdisciplinary and emphasizes thinking that is firmly anchored in action, intervention, and scholarly critical practice. In 2015, we see critical alternatives in alignment with utopian principles—that is, the hope that things might not only be different but also radically better. At the same time, radically better alternatives don’t emerge out of nowhere: they emerged from contested analyses of the mundane present and demand both commitment and labor to work towards them. More information here .Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference