Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. 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?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Residency: Choreo-graphic Figures - Embodied Diagrams



CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES - Embodied Diagrams 
Nikolaus Gansterer / Mariella  Greil / Emma Cocker and guests:
29 February - 12 March 2016

This Spring, the artistic research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line by artist-performer Nikolaus Gansterer, choreographer-dancer Mariella Greil and writer-artist Emma Cocker stage an intensive residency laboratory in collaboration with TanzQuartier Wien. In dialogue with a team of international critical interlocutors including Alex Arteaga, Lilia Mestre, Werner Moebius, Jörg Piringer, Christine de Smedt and other guests, this research residency focuses on gesturing with and towards the experience of vitality within the process of live exploration, putting epistemologies, relational processes and the potentials of embodiment through diagrammatic practice under scrutiny. The Spring Lab will be open for the public on 11th March, 2016. All are cordially invited to join on 11th March, 2016, 17:00 - 20:00 for the Spring Lab Opening at the residency laboratory.
Admission free/ Please make a reservation (Max. 20 participants). More about this residency can be found here.



Lecture: Tuesday Talks - Whitworth/MMU

16 February
The Whitworth, Grand Hall
11am – 12.30pm, free, no booking necessary
Tuesday Talks

I have been invited to give a presentation as part of the Tuesday talks series at the Whitworth, Manchester. Tuesday Talks invites leading artists, thinkers and curators to explore the driving forces, influences and sources of inspiration within contemporary art. The Tuesday Talks series are a collaboration between the Whitworth and Manchester Metropolitan University.


Publication - The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice


I have been invited to contribute to the forthcoming publication The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice eds. Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley.

This edited collection brings together a range of examples of how to write about one’s own (art)work in a creative yet academically rigorous way. In a world where practice-as-research is becoming increasingly recognised and valued, artistic-researchers are always looking for ways to discuss and analyse their own work without compromising the creative drive that inspired them in the first place. The collection will comprise of sample writings (which will be introduced and contextualised) by leading researcher-practitioners and emerging artists alike, which will serve as examples for students and independent practitioners interested in writing and thinking about their own work in a creative yet critical, alternative yet theoretically rigorous way.

Writing without Writing: Conversation as Material
My proposed contribution shares and elaborates a method of ‘writing without writing’ that I have developed through a number of practice-based collaborations, where conversation is conceived as both the site and the material for the construction of inter-subjective and immanent modes of linguistic sense-making. I propose to present examples (in the form of artists’ pages) from various collaborative projects, reflecting on the different ways that conversation-as-material functions therein as a means for producing writing as/in dialogue with practice. Conversation-as-material involves the quest for a not-yet-known vocabulary emerging synchronous to the situation it seeks to articulate, formed through the co-production of a language rolled around in the mouth until it starts to yield or give. In this process, meaning does not exist prior to the event of utterance; rather, it is discovered (often retrospectively) through a dialogic process, moreover, through the transcription and distillation of recorded conversation towards an emergent poetics. 



Project: Weaving Codes | Coding Weaves


I will be working in Dusseldorf from 25 – 28 January on the Weaving Codes | Coding Weaves project along with Alex Mclean, Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Dave Griffiths and Julian Rohrhuber.

The AHRC project Weaving Codes – Coding Weaves (Alex McLean, Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Dave Griffiths, Emma Cocker) will have their second residency at the IMM, presenting an overview of the project so far and exploring the connection of weaves and codes with the students. We want to explore (tablet-)weaving and live coding together, considering both looms and computers as algorithmic environments for creative work with pattern. The connection between computing and the Jacquard loom is well explored, but we want to go deeper to investigate traditional weaving for its digital nature, including the genesis of discrete mathematics in ancient textile technologies. Thus we like to connect to an alternative account of computer programming with its roots in arts and craft.

As part of this mini-workshop/residency I will be developing ideas for a series of research articles exploring Live Coding in relation to ideas of kairos (opportune timing) and mêtis (cunning or wily intelligence), as well as reflecting on the specific temporalities of live coding.




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