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.

Research Pavilion, Venice 2019


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I have been invited to be part of the forthcoming Research Pavilion in the context of the Venice Biennale 2019, as part of a research ‘cell’ developed by Alex Arteaga entitled Through Phenomena Themselves: Exploring new possibilities of mutual enhancement between artistic and phenomenological research practices.

About the Research Pavilion
The Research Pavilion is an ongoing project created and hosted by the University of the Arts Helsinki. Research Pavilion #3 is created in cooperation with the Louise and Göran Ehrnrooth Foundation and international partner institutions: Aalto University, Valand Academy of Arts at the University of Gothenburg, University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Interlab Hongik University Seoul.

Research Pavilion #3 is a meeting place, a catalyst of emerging co-operations, and a generator of new artistic thinking. It brings together a multitude of topical practices of artistic research in a jointly agreed form. The participating researchers – operating in six different research cells – will display various modes of creative thinking in parallel processes of exhibiting, performing, exposing, discussing, and articulating material encounters and related forms of critical reflection. Working from such multifaceted attitudes and atmospheres, Research Pavilion #3 is clearly impelled by the debate on current predicaments in our so-called posthuman era. Those predicaments involve the state of the ecological disequilibrium, the relational approach to forms of agency, the development of trans-disciplinary and transversal discourses, and last but not least the exploration of novel practices of criticism and narrativity in neo-materialistic propositions.

Spurred on by a general ecologization of thinking, Research Pavilion #3 will set the agenda for ethicopolitical statements on the level of shared practices. In our current decade, we suffer from a loss of common orientation, a common world, a common planet if you will. We have to think again about the world, since we desperately need another system of coordinates, another distribution of metaphors and sensitivities, as well as novel fictions and imaginaries to address configurations of the present and to restate speculations about directions in the future. The above observations challenge artistic research to articulate idiosyncratic modes of representation and reflection addressing the present global environmental crisis while taking historical responsibilities into account and creating provoking interconnections between research practices and their environments – in short: to articulate research ecologies. When the two concepts of research and ecology are linked – or rather, placed as two focal points in an ellipse – their contours and conditions could become decisive for the current state and direction of the artistic research discourse. Research Pavilion #3 not only calls attention to urgent ecological themes, but also explicitly claims a particular role for artistic research in dealing with the topical and pressing issues outlined above. Research Pavilion #3 deploys the ways of questioning and working specific to artistic research as well as its particular ecologies of practice. Therefore, it takes the form of a process-oriented Lab for testing and negotiating topical forms of material and social agency.

The Research Pavilion is an ongoing project created and hosted by Uniarts Helsinki. Research Pavilion #3 is created in cooperation with the Louise and Göran Ehrnrooth Foundation and international partner institutions. The main partners are Aalto University, Valand Academy of Arts at the University of Gothenburg, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Interlab Hongik University Seoul, and Taipei National University of the Arts.

Research cells and Switchboard
The Research Pavilion #3 project proceeds towards the high season in Venice through a series of research cell assemblies in September 2018, November 2018, and February 2019. A group of international experts – Esa Kirkkopelto, Sunjung Kim, Ellen J Røed, Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger and Giaco Schiesser – have been invited to facilitate this self-reflective and collaborative process. Due to its decisive role in articulating interconnections between the Research Cells, this group of experts is called the Switchboard.

Research cells in the Research Pavilion project
Astopia
Cemetry Archipelago: On the imaginaries of human and non-human death
Disruptive Processes + Artistic Intelligence Research Alternator AIRA
Shelters
Territories :: Dialects
Through Phenomena Themselves: Exploring new possibilities of mutual enhancement between artistic and phenomenological research practices
Traces from the Anthropocene: Working with Soil & Insects among Us

Read more at www.researchpavilion.fi

Lecture and Workshop: Being in the Midst




Emma Cocker, Score Propositions
(Experimental Reading) from No Telos, Venice, 2017
Original photograph: Elle Reynolds

Between 29 - 31 October I will be giving a lecture and leading a 2-day workshop called Being in the Midst: Per-forming Thinking-in-Action, the Kunst Musikk Design Faculty of Arts [kmd] in Bergen, Norway.
Drawing on recent projects, I propose to explore different artistic practices and approaches that are reflexively alert and attentive to the live circumstances – or occasionality - of their own processual production: the thinking-in-action, the kairos of decision-making, the moments of knowing and of not knowing, the navigation of competing forces, of working with and through obstacles or of figuring something out.