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.

Network/Workshop: Pause for Thought

In April I was invited to participate in an AHRC Network Workshop called Pause for Thought: Media Literacy in an Age of Incessant Change, coordinated by Dr Thomas Sutherland (University of Lincoln) and Dr Scott Wark (University of Warwick). The aim of Pause for Thought is to create an interdisciplinary network of scholars, artists, writers, media practitioners, and creative professionals who are invested in the future of media literacy and who might both benefit from and contribute to the formulation of modes of analysis, creative practices, and teaching strategies appropriate for our rapidly shifting media landscape. Should we look upon the unavoidable inability of our practice to keep up with technological change as some kind of failure? Should we leave the question of how we live with technology to those who impose it upon us? Or can we view our experience and our practices as points of departure for a more constructive critique of the high-speed society?

Responses from the workshop have been gathered as a project website here 


My own response comprises an abridged version of my introduction to the conference Doing Deceleration (that I co-organised with Henk Slager 4th July 2017, Nottingham Contemporary), and can be read here