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. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. 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; 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: THE STARS LOOK SO DIFFERENT TONIGHT


Exhibition at Fotogalerie Wien
from 29.01.2019 to 02.03.2019
Andreas Müller, Anthony Carr, Nikolaus Gansterer (in collaboration with Emma Cocker), Sheung Yiu, William Mokrynski, Anja Nowak
  
The chosen title, The Stars Look So Different Tonight, can be understood as a metaphor for marvelling, the starting point of the human thirst for knowledge. The artist positions here have in common a subjective approach to fundamental questions of nature as well as being investigative regarding perceptual processes and visualization strategies. Their poetic and sensual appropriation of scientific pictorial language, enriched with fictitious or hyperrealist stagings and speculative laboratories, opens up a fresh look at the familiar. The sober, objective methodologies of natural science are contrasted with experimental, sometimes playful, approaches that recognise and accept the ambivalences and mysteries of the objects under investigation.