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.

Presentation: Site-Reading - Site Specific Writing and Reading


With Lena Séraphin, I co-presented a performative rendering of the project Site-Reading – Site Specific Writing and Reading as part of the Society of Artistic Research conference, Dare | Care | Share  (7 - 9 April 2021)


Abstract: Site-Reading dares to conceive writing, reading and listening as aesthetic research practices, caring for their inter-subjective potential, whilst asking how shared spaces are constructed in/by/with text. Invited writers/artistic researchers make written observations of a public site for a timebound period, collaborating in a shared action, though geographically apart. The performativity of this practice redefines the solitary act of writing, introducing site-specific writing as a literary genre. Reading the texts aloud together creates a liminal space, through the intermingling of different voices, places and approaches to writing/reading. Where are you when you listen — especially if you don’t grasp the language? Does Site-Reading affirm a shared space — what does it look or feel like?

 

Site-Reading – Site Specific Writing and Reading is initiated by Emma Cocker and Lena Séraphin, in association with writers Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus, Sepideh Karami, Vidha Saumya.


A research catalogue exposition of the project can be found here