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.

Event: Gathering of Language-based Artistic Research 

Image: from A_Collective_”I” 

In July we – Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin - were in Weimar, Germany, introducing the activities of the Special Interest Group of Language-based Artistic Research as part of the Society of Artistic Research Conference 2022 [ Weimar, Germany, Friday 1 July 2022, 14.30 - 15.50 CET, Bauhaus-Universität, Marienstraße 13 c, 99423 Weimar]

In this first in-person meeting since 2019, we continued to explore the questions: How is language-based artistic research? How to enable connections and affinities between researchers? How to establish shared frames of reference? Since 2019, this Language-based Artistic Research Special Interest Group has evolved through various activities including Practice Sharing (2020), a gathering of over 70 online examples of language-based practices from diverse fields such as visual arts, performance, film, theatre, music, choreography and literature; and Affinities and Urgencies (2021/22), two online events that comprised sessions facilitated by different groups or individuals identifying constellations of interest and focus within this expanding field of research practice. This live and in-person session during the SAR conference continued along these lines moving towards a more distributed organisation of the Special Interest Group. We shared recent activities, introduce ‘thematic nodes’ and engaged with a wider community of artistic researchers, including a second call for ‘Practice Sharing’. 
 
With introductions to emergent thematic nodes in proposed running order of presentation:
 
- A_Collective_”I”
Daisy Hildyard | Katrin Hahner | Rosie Heinrich| Sepideh Karami
- Collective writing in public space
Initiated by Lena Séraphin with Emma Cocker | Andrea Coyotzi Borja| Cordula Daus | Vidha Saumya
- The un|common ground
Regina Dürig | Marinos Koutsomichalis | Phoenix Savage,| Anna T
- Articulating Solitudes
Steve Dutton | Adelheid Mers
- Words as Matter
Mariana Renthel | Anouk Hoogendoorn
- Writing as research as writing
Marjolijn van den Berg | Nirav Christophe | Daniela Moosmann | Ninke Overbeek
- Unspeakable Dialogues: Narratives for the Anthropocene
Rachel Armstrong | Breg Horemans | Rolf Hughes | Virginia Tassinari
 
See recorded presentations here