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.

Exhibition/symposium: Documents, Alternatives


Documents, Alternatives: 
a symposium of artistic process and practice, 
curated by Angela Bartram.
20 April 2018
Bath School of Art and Design

Following previous iterations at project space plus, Lincoln and Verge Gallery, Sydney, Australia, ‘Documents, Alternatives (#3)’ is an exhibition that includes time-based works that rely on performative process and created experience, where both the document and artwork operate reflexively. Accompanying the exhibition at BSAD, a half-day symposium will open the nature of artistic process to critical debate. The exhibition and symposium will include new iterations of the 'project' The Italic I - a collaboration between myself and artist Clare Thorton - including video-based work, publication and performance reading.

The Italic I: Between Liveness, Language and the Lens
Emma Cocker & Clare Thornton
In this performance reading, Cocker and Thornton stage a dialogue between the visual and textual documents produced within their artistic collaboration, The Italic I. Within The Italic I, the studio is approached as a gymnasium or testing ground for purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated fall, which is slowed and extended through the use of both language and the lens. The live performance of falling is willfully not shared with an audience; instead, this enquiry focuses on the specificity of experience communicable in the mediation of performance through its documents, both photographic and linguistic. We ask, firstly: How do we attend to the experiential nature of falling rather than documenting it only as a visual event? How can we present the fall as a force rather than simply representing its form? How might we communicate the qualities of passage and the multi-, micro-temporal dimension of falling? Secondly, how can we develop a mode of linguistic expression — an alternative poetic textual document — that embodies rather than describes the live experience that it seeks to articulate? How can language document an alternative encounter with falling, the ‘free-fall’ experienced within the process of dialogic exchange? Thirdly, what alternative modalities of performance and performativity — what emergent temporalities and subjectivities — arise through the reactivation of our performance documents? What is at stake at the threshold where liveness, lens and language meet, in the gap or interval between performance and its mediation, between event and document?



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