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.

Residency/Workshops: CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES – SUMMER LAB


11 July - 14 August 2016
"CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES – SUMMER LAB"
This year’s Summer Lab of the artistic research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line - by artist-performer Nikolaus Gansterer, choreographer-dancer Mariella Greil and writer-artist Emma Cocker – will take place in collaboration with AILab and ImPulsTanz Festival. Working in dialogue with “the sputniks” Alex Arteaga, Lilia Mestre, Christine de Smedt and special guests, the focus for this Lab is on the choreo-graphic qualities of translational processes, shifts of attention, and modes of language. Evolving previous research around notation and radical scores of attention and embodied diagrams, the project focus now turns towards experimental forms of publication, explored through a series of public openings in various formats including lectures, workshops, and performances.

The CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES Summer Lab will unfold through two interconnected workshops: Intensive I (Shifts of Attention: vigilance, engagement and translational processes) and Intensive II (Modes of Languages: words as material), within the frame of ImPulsTanz Festival.

Alex Arteaga, Mariella Greil, Lilia Mestre
CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES: Intensive I (23. + 24.7.2016)
Shifts of Attention: vigilance, engagement and translational processes
This Intensive seeks out the choreo-graphic traces of translational processes, exploring the dynamics and shifts of attention, modes of engagement and relational intensities happening at the passage from one medium - writing-drawing-choreography - to the other. Evolving previous research around radical scores of attention, notation and embodied diagrams, the project’s focus now turns towards the liminal spaces emerging through crossing fields of practice, through the textualisation of performance matters and experimental forms of translation. The embodiment of ideas and concepts is explored through rigorous commitment to thinking-in-action. This Intensive focuses on the particularity of expanded art forms through the development of cross-modal perceptive scores, where the question of „how-ness“ overwrites and challenges the notion of disciplinary boundaries. We investigate somatic practices with special care for cultivating alertness to compositional decision-making within a collaborative creative process, and the development of an expanded system of notation based on vitality gestures as embodied diagrammatics.

Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer, Christine de Smedt
CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES: Intensive II (30. + 31.7.2016)
Modes of Languages: Words as Material
This Intensive turns towards experimental forms of publication, focusing on the notion of words as material, and the liberation of language from the regime of signification and informational exchange towards an embodied poetics. Evolving previous research around the reverberation of speech and voice and the embodiment of text, we continue our investigation around the aesthetic-epistemological gesture of artistic (re)searching, explored through the transformation of words, the act of rolling language around in the mouth as a physical practice. The starting point for this field of experimentation are conversational transcripts from our three-year artistic research project, approached as live material for playful appropriation and reworking. Our emphasis is on activating language through rhythmic, relational speech acts: through the affect of breath and air bringing qualities of lightness and aeration, the babble of overlapping voices reading together, echoes and translations, stutters and repetitions, whispered conversations assembled from dislocated fragments of text.