Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. 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?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Publication in progress: Choreo-graphic Figures



Between 2 – 9 February 2017, I was working at Zentrum Fokus Forschung in Vienna, with Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil and designer Simona Koch, on the final content, layout and graphic design of our forthcoming book, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line. The publication is conceived as a studio-laboratory in itself, drawing together critical reflections and experimental practices that focus on the how-ness — the qualitative-processual, aesthetic-epistemological and ethico-empathetic dynamics — within shared artistic exploration, directing attention to an affective realm of forces and intensities operating before, between and beneath the more readable gestures of artistic practice. Hybrid of an artists-book and research compendium, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line invokes action by operating as a 'score' that can be activated by others, providing artists, theorists and creative practitioners with a modular system of performative and notational tools for future experimental play. More on the publication and related launch events to follow.