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.

Reading Group: Affective Memory

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

Week 3 (22 March 2012), 6.00 – 7.30pm
Affect and Memory: the possibility and problematic of prosthetic memory
Continuing the exploration of the affective fragment or ‘refrain’ (following Guattari), the next reading group session addresses the relationship between affect and memory. Alison Landsberg’s writing on Prosthetic Memory is taken as a starting point for exploring the empathetic potential of affective memory whilst questioning what is at stake once the ‘affective refrain’ or ‘memory’ is detached or dislocated from its originary context, once it is open to commodification and exchange.

Suggested reading:
- to be skimmed, glimpsed, looked at, or read ….
Alison Landsberg, “Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22.2 (June 2009).
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, (Columbia University Press, 2004), Chapter, Prosthetic Memory, pp. 25 – 48.