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.

Reading group: Affective Labour & the Politics of Witnessing


I am currently facilitating a reading group at Site Gallery around the notion of Affect.

Affect Readings @ Site Gallery, Sheffield
Thursday 19 April 2012, 6pm onwards
Affective Labour & the Politics of Witnessing

The last reading group session opened out into an interesting discussion for wrestling with the possibilities and also the more problematic aspects of Alison Landsberg's notion of prosthetic memory. The next session extends the dialogue around the notion of affect further, by shifting attention towards affective labour and the politics of witnessing. These ideas will be explored through the prism of two texts: Michael Hardt’s Affective Labour and Jan Verwoert’s You Make Me Feel Mighty Real: On the Risk of Bearing Witness and the Art of Affective Labour.