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.

Presentation: Kairotic Practice


I will be giving a presentation on the 21st March at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, London as part of an event organised by live-coders Thor Magnusson and Alex Mclean. The event is an introductory, cross-disciplinary research symposium, with the aim to provide rich context for live coding research, which will include talks by myself, Nick Collins (Reader in Composition, University of Durham) and and Alexandra Cardenas (University of the Arts, Berlin). Full details soon. Register at the event here.

 My presentation will draw on my article Live Notation: Reflections on a Kairotic Practice, which will be published very soon in a forthcoming issue of Performance Research. In this article, I develop (amongst other things) the term ‘kairotic coding’ to describe the ‘occasionality’ of live coding, conceiving it as a practice alert to whilst simultaneously intent on developing a language to articulate the live circumstances of its own making. This research forms part of a broader and ongoing enquiry in which I am considering the 'enquiring of the enquiry' or the endeavour of artistic endeavour as a form of techné, a tactical knowledge fusing the principles of mêtis (cunning intelligence) and kairos (opportune timing).