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.

Project: Pay attention to the footnotes (Kuopio)




Pay Attention to the Footnotes, Kuopio (2010)
Emma Cocker (with Open City)

Documented during the timeframe of ANTI festival, Kuopio, Finland
29th September – 3rd October

The documentation attempts to provide a tangential record of the festival, whilst testing a project conceived in relation to urban city space against the site-specificity of Kuopio.

No.1 documented whilst locating Holly Rumble’s One Minute Bird Watching
No.2 documented not far from Rosie Dennis’ Downtown Kuopio
No.3 documented on route to Kira O’ Reilly’s Untitled Bomb Shelter Action for Kuopio, Returning
No.4 documented 12 minutes into Regin Igloria’s The ANTI 10K Run Write Run!
No.5 documented in the vicinity of Caroline Bergvall’s Flag Up
No.6 documented at the site of Maija Hirvanen’s On Ice Anti
No.7 documented round the corner from Sarah van Lamsweerde’s Instant Fiction
No.8 documented 16 hours after Johanna Hällsten’s Everyday Opera