Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Emma's research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of ‘thinking-in-action’ therein. Her practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches, alongside a mode of ‘contiguous writing’ — a way of writing-with that seeks to touch upon rather than being explicitly about. Her writing is 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; Reading/Feeling, 2013; 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.

Publication in development: Choreo-graphic Figures


From Summer onwards, we - myself, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil (and invited contributors) - will be working to develop content for an artists' publication from the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, within which we will present the core conceptual, methodological and aesthetic discoveries made during our shared research. By grappling with the physical components of the publication during the recent Summer Lab in Vienna as a form of live exploration in and of itself, we were able to discern a structure comprised of textual-visual chapters including the Undisciplinary, Figure >< Figuring, Embodied Diagrammatics, which will be presented alongside an elaboration of the Method Lab model itself, artists’ pages for the various 'Figures' that we have developed through our research process, and an extended expositional section for articulating a ‘toolkit’ of working approaches related to the Practices of Attention, Notation, Conversation and Wit(h)nessing. Additionally, our publication will comprise contributions from many of the critical wit(h)nesses who have encountered our evolving research including Alex Arteaga, Arno Boehler and Susanne Granzer, Gabrielle Cram, Christine De Smedt, Karin Harrasser, Krassimira Kruschkova, Brandon Labelle, Lilia Mestre, Dieter Mersch, Werner Möbius, Alva Noë, Jeanette Pacher, Jörg Piringer, Helmut Ploebst, P. A. Skantze, Andreas Spiegl. Themes that we have invited for consideration include an exploration of:
  • Aesthetic research through the prism of enactivist theory;
  • Tactics of organisation/reorganization and the notion of affordance;
  • Critical curiosity and creative impulse;
  • The forces, flows and intensities at play within the time-space of artistic research;
  • The fluidity of co-emergence;
  • The time-space of the studio/lab, the durations and temporalities of artistic practice;
  • The play between attention and inattention, between productivity and non-productivity within the cycle of artistic labour;
  • Practices of resistance to utilitarianism or instrumentalisation, to dominant modes of production and the market;
  • The entanglement of experimentation and experience within collaboration and participation;
  • Possibilities for action and ethics beyond the normative within both aesthetic exploration and the wider societal field;
  • Non-categorical thinking, experimentation, plasticity and essaying as ways of avoiding closure;
  • The fragility, intimacy and solidarity arising from our entanglement with others, alongside the surfacing of ethical sensitivities;
  • The nano-political potential of minor movement-acts within aesthetic exploration and their reverberation within the wider societal field.