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.

Training: Micro-phenomenological Interview

Between 5 – 9 December 2022, I was undertaking training in Micro-phenomenological interview training online with Claire Petitmengin.

About: Micro-phenomenology is a new scientific discipline enabling us to discover ordinary inaccessible dimensions of our lived experience and describe them accurately and reliably. The development of this "psychological microscope" opens vast fields of investigation in the educational, technological, clinical and therapeutic, as well as artistic and contemplative domains.

Objective of the training: For the purpose of a research project, the course is aimed at mastering the micro-phenomenological interview, a method enabling the researcher to collect fine-grained descriptions of the lived experience associated with a given sensorial, emotional or cognitive process, or with a specific expertise, in order to gather a corpus of accurate data that are relevant for the research objective.

More here: https://www.microphenomenology.com/

Research: Dorsal Practices


In late November, I was working in Sheffield with choreographer Katrina Brown, further developing our collaborative research project Dorsal Practices. Though we have been working together since early 2020, this was really our first in-person exploration together (with the exception of us presenting a workshop and performance reading at the Sentient Performativities symposium in June 2022). Our shared exploration together in Sheffield including a live back-to-back process of ‘dorsal conversation’, a series of movement practices exploring walking backwards, leaning, and lying down, alongside working with filmmaker Leon Lockley to make a recording of a performance reading / reading practice based on previous transcript material from earlier conversations. An extract of the recording of the reading can be encountered here.


Publication: Live Coding - A User's Manual

Performative, improvised, on the fly: live coding is about how people interact with the world and each other via code. In the last few decades, live coding has emerged as a dynamic creative practice, gaining attention across cultural and technical fields—from music and the visual arts to computer science.


Live Coding: A User’s Manual is the first comprehensive introduction to the practice and a broader cultural commentary on the potential for live coding to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. This multiauthored book—by artists and musicians, software designers, and researchers—provides a practice-focused account of the origins, aspirations, and evolution of live coding, including expositions from a wide range of live coding practitioners. In a more conceptual register, the authors consider liveness, temporality, and knowledge in relation to live coding, alongside speculating on the practice’s future forms.


Read the book!

This book is published open access by MIT Press, widely available in paperback (please consider using an ethical bookseller), and for free download as epub, pdf or mobi files:

 * Download as epub (recommended for e-readers)

 *  Download as pdf (may be easiest for laptops/desktops)

 *  individual chapters are also available as separate PDFs via MIT Press

 *  Download as mobi

For e-readers, please refer to your device’s manual for how to load them. For example on kindle, you could use the send to kindle service, and on others you might transfer via usb cable from a computer.

There is also an experimental version readable online.


Authors

This book is written by Alan Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Thor Magnusson, with an expositions chapter consisting of contributions from Rangga Aji, ALGOBABEZ, Jack Armitage, Rafaele Andrade, Pietro Bapthysthe, Lina Bautista, Renick Bell, Alexandra Cardenas, Lucy Cheesman, Joana Chicau, Nick Collins, Malitzin Cortes, Mamady Diara, Claudio Donaggio, Rebecca, a Fernandes, Jason Freeman, Flor de Fuego, Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo, Mike Hodnick, Timo Hoogland, Miri Kaat, Abhinay Khoparzi, Shawn Lawson, Melody Loveless, Mynah Marie, Fabrice Mogini, Kofi Oduro, David Ogborn, Jonathan Reus, MicoRex, Antonio Roberts, Charlie Roberts, Jessica Rodriguez, Iris Saladino, Kate Sicchio, th4, Rodrigo Velasco, Elizabeth Wilson, and Anna Xambo.

Please refer to the acknowledgments section of the book for a (unfortunately but necessarily incomplete) list of all those who made this book possible.

 

Design: The cover design is by Joana Chicau, using FT88 from the Degheest font family designed by Mandy Elbé and Oriane Charvieux, based on typeface by Ange Degheest.

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