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.

Publication: Choreo-graphic Figures - Deviations from the Line


With artistic research at its heart, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line  stages a beyond disciplinary, inter-subjective encounter between the lines of choreography, drawing and writing. Its core focus is to explore those forms of thinking-in-action produced through collaborative exchange, in the slippage and deviation when different modes of practice enter into dialogue, overlap, collide.



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 existing before, between and beneath the more readable gestures of artistic practice. Cultivating sensitivity towards the barely perceptible micro-movements within the process of artistic ‘sense-making’ has wider structural — even political — implications at the level of the macro, encouraging the de-, re- and trans-figuring of our ways of being in the world, inviting new forms of relationality, sociality and solidarity. 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 toolkit of performative and notational approaches for future experimental play.



Based on original research and edited by Nikolaus Gansterer, Emma Cocker and Mariella Greil. With contributions by Alex Arteaga, Arno Böhler, Christine De Smedt, Catherine de Zegher, Christopher Dell, Gerhard Dirmoser, Karin Harrasser, Adrian Heathfield, Victor Jaschke, Simona Koch, Krassimira Kruschkova, Brandon LaBelle, Erin Manning, Dieter Mersch, Lilia Mestre, Werner Moebius, Alva Noë, Jeanette Pacher, Jörg Piringer, Helmut Ploebst, P.A. Skantze, Andreas Spiegl



More details on the book here. 
Sample pages here.
Buy the book here. 





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