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: Reading on Reading

READING ON READING

During the my first phase of research activity during the Research Pavilion, Venice, I was engaged in the collaborative practice of reading on reading with Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin.

Different ways of reading can generate different registers of sense making and affect; there is scope for testing experimental tactics. Reading can be activated mid-sentence or half way down a page, allowing for detours and distractions. Certain language must be rolled in the mouth before it can be digested, new meanings revealed in the pauses and durations breathed between the words. Drawing on their different research interests around language, Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin propose to test and explore different practices of 'reading on reading' at various locations within the Sala del Camino. Our shared exploration unfolded through a series of PRACTICES for Reading on Reading:  CIRCUIT POETICS; LETTERING; LOUDING THE LAPSE; NOTICING ATTRACTION; RE-SENSING; WALKING-READING; WEIGHTLIFTING


Reading on Reading unfolded as a live exploration at the following times:
Wednesday 8 May:
14.30 – 15.30, 17.00 – 18.00
Thursday 9 May:
14.00 – 15.00, 15.30 – 16.30, 17.00 – 18.00
Friday 10 May:
14.00 – 15.00, 15.30 – 16.30, 17.00 – 18.00