My paper 'Beating the ‘Invisible’ Boundary: Navigating the space in-between' has been accepted for the Aberystwyth University Living Landscapes conference, June 18 - 21, where there will be papers, presentations, performances and workshops from artists and scholars from the fields of performance, geography, archaeology, fine art, folklore studies, anthropology and literature.
Click here for more information about the conference.
Focusing on projects such as Heath Bunting’s BorderXing and Status Project, and the collaborations between Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Research Laboratory (Nottingham), my intent is explore the critical function of the artist as both a guide or broker to the indeterminate geographies emerging between virtual and 'real' landscapes. Such practices articulate a performative crossing of physical or spatial boundaries, played out at the terrain vagues ‘betwixt or between’ the real and virtual; the visible and invisible; the physical and psychological. Making conceptual reference to the mythical figure of Hermes - god of gaps and thresholds, of boundaries and travelers who cross them – I am proposing to position the artist/wanderer as a disruptive and resistant (mis)guide to the nascent and unstable territories that are emerging between physical landscapes and digital worlds.
- emma cocker
- 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.