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: Weaving Codes | Coding Weaves


I will be working in Dusseldorf from 25 – 28 January on the Weaving Codes | Coding Weaves project along with Alex Mclean, Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Dave Griffiths and Julian Rohrhuber.

The AHRC project Weaving Codes – Coding Weaves (Alex McLean, Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Dave Griffiths, Emma Cocker) will have their second residency at the IMM, presenting an overview of the project so far and exploring the connection of weaves and codes with the students. We want to explore (tablet-)weaving and live coding together, considering both looms and computers as algorithmic environments for creative work with pattern. The connection between computing and the Jacquard loom is well explored, but we want to go deeper to investigate traditional weaving for its digital nature, including the genesis of discrete mathematics in ancient textile technologies. Thus we like to connect to an alternative account of computer programming with its roots in arts and craft.

As part of this mini-workshop/residency I will be developing ideas for a series of research articles exploring Live Coding in relation to ideas of kairos (opportune timing) and mêtis (cunning or wily intelligence), as well as reflecting on the specific temporalities of live coding.