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. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. 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; 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.

Writing/Publication: Edge of Europe


I have been commissioned to produce a new piece of writing/text for a publication to be published later this year by Edge of Europe project. The writing will be developed specifically in the context of the Writing, Language and Site seminar programme that is part of this year’s ANTI festival in Kuopio.

Edge of Europe is a digital, social and experimental project in the areas of performance and writing. The project explores the artistic and critical possibilities of writing and other forms of textual work in their relation to contemporary performance.

The main concern of the project is in the role of live performance in the current society. However, it looks ‘performance’ widely through performance art, Live Art, contemporary theatre and dance, contemporary visual art, literature, media art and beyond. The project results as meetings, texts in web and different traditional media, new connections of artists, writers and operators, writing and performance laboratories, seminars, presentations and performances.

Edge of Europe includes professional exchange and development of knowledge on contextualization practices, artistic writing and innovations that combine writing and performance. Its nature is collaborative, experimental and interdisciplinary. Edge of Europe celebrates opening up possibilities in writing about and for performance, not closing them down.

The project is a part of Kiasma Theatre's (Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland) activity 2008-2010. It is designed and coordinated by artist Maija Hirvanen. 2009-2010 Edge of Europe has been funded by Nordic Culture Point