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.

Publication: Artistic Research Does #7 - Tactics for Not Knowing



It is a decade since my essay ‘Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected’ was first published in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (Black Dog Publishing, 2013) edited by Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum. The text has just been re-published with a translation into Portuguese, as part of the Artistic Research Does series (published by i2ADS – Institute of Research in Art, Design and Society, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto).

 

The revised version of ‘Tactics for Not Knowing’ in Artistic Research Does #7 offers two further interventions in the form of annotations. In one column of margin notes, I share additional reflections, referring to some of my more recent artistic research projects and collaborations that continue to resonate with the concerns of the original text. In parallel, a second column of margin notes comprises the titles of additional pieces of contiguous writing drawn from two collections of my creative prose writing, The Yes of the No (2016) and How Do You Do? (2024). 

 

Within the online version of the publication these margin notes include hyperlinks that enable the reader to access these different thought-fragments of writing. See here. 

 

The PDF version can be downloaded here.


The publication was launched on 26 October 2023, along with the release of Derivas, a publication by Doctoral researchers in Art Education. Images from the launch below.




Images: @i2ads 2023