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.

Language-Based Artistic Research: Special Interest Group



Towards curiosity and openness, exploration beyond definition: How is language-based artistic research? Beyond words alone, how is artistic research undertaken in and through different language-based practices? The focus on language within artistic research is considered from a broad and transforming perspective to include diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography as well as literature. The intent is not to define or fix what language-based artistic research is but rather to reflect how it is practised in its diversity.

 

Conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena S̩raphin, this Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) provides a context for coming together via the exchange of language-based artistic research. A SIG website has now been launched Рsee https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/835089/835129

 

Emergent aims of the Special Interest Group include: to explore language as part of artistic research practice rather than as a tool of explication and accounting; to expand the idea of language-based practices (to include and to move beyond writing, reading, speaking, listening); to create contexts (physical and virtual) for language-based artistic researchers to show and share practices; identify examples of practice within the field of artistic research and to establish shared frames of reference; share the findings from projects and residencies that focus on language-based artistic research.

 

Call for Contributions: Artist-researchers working with language are invited to contribute to Practice Sharing, an online presentation of expanded approaches to language-based practice within the field of artistic research. Examples of language-based artistic research are invited focusing on specific practices, processes, approaches or methods; ways of working, constellations of activity or framing patterns, particular projects or lines of enquiry-in-practice. Deadline for submissions: 30 September 2020.  See full call here: