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/Performance: Choreo—graphic Figures





Embodied diagrams and vitality gestures, relational and translational encounters. Attention heightened towards a barely perceptible realm of micro-movements and micro-gestures: the shifts of awareness and affordance activated in the side-by-side of collaborative exchange; opened up through the interference of space, sound, body and material, in the passage from one medium — writing-drawing-choreography — to another. Choreo—graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 — 2017) is an interdisciplinary artistic research collaboration involving key researchers artist Nikolaus Gansterer, choreographer Mariella Greil and writer-artist Emma Cocker, in dialogue with a team of international critical interlocutors including Alex Arteaga, Lilia Mestre, Christine de Smedt, Werner Mobius, Jörg Piringer and other guests. Choreo—graphic Figures attends to the unfolding processes of decision-making and dynamic movements of sense-making (figuring) within collaborative artistic enquiry, developing forms of performativity and notation (choreo—graphic figures) for making tangible this often hidden, undisclosed aspect of the creative process.



 From Summer 2016, the focus of the Choreo—graphic Figures project turns towards experimental forms of publication, for ‘making public’ the live intensity of its exploration, its moments of discovery and revelation. This year's Summer Lab will take place in collaboration with AILab and ImPulsTanz Festival. Research findings will be shared through various formats including public workshop intensives (Intensive I: Shifts of Attention: vigilance, engagement and translational processes and Intensive II: Modes of Languages: words as material), staged in conjunction with a lecture programme (with public lectures from special guests Brandon LaBelle, Alva Noë, Dieter Mersch and P.A. Skantza) and a durational performance, Choreo-graphic Figures: Body Diagrams on 2.8.2016 at 16:00-22:00 at AILab, Vienna, Austria.




On Friday 22 July at 18:00 our two special guests of Intensive I will give public lectures at AILab: Dieter Mersch - (“Figuration/Defiguration. On the dialectics of”Choreo-Graphy”) and P. A. Skantze (“I’m A Strange Kind of In-Between Thing”
). Admission free! On Friday 29 July at 18:00 our two special guests of Intensive II will give public lectures at AILab: Brandon LaBelle (“This Weakness That I Am”) and Alva Noë (“Writing Ourselves”). Admission free! Both Friday Lectures will be moderated by Chris Standfest in conversation with the team and guests of the Choreo-graphic Figures research project. A choreo-graphic publication drawing together materials from the project (with contributions from invited guests) will be launched in 2017.