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.

Conference Paper: Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos


My conference paper ‘Live Coding/Weaving — Penelopean Mêtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos’ has been accepted as part of the forthcoming International Conference on Live Coding, hosted by ICSRiM in the School of Music, University of Leeds, UK, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of the Live Coding Research Network. http://iclc.livecodenetwork.org/

 A list of contributors can be found here.

Abstract
Drawing on my experience as a critical interlocutor within the Weaving Codes, Coding Weaves project (2014-2016), in this paper I propose potential points of connection between Ancient weaving and live coding, considering both practices through the prism of the Ancient Greek concept of techné, a species of tactical knowledge combining the principles of mêtis (cunning intelligence) and kairos (opportune timing). Specifically, this enquiry addresses the human qualities of attention, cognitive agility and tactical intelligence activated within both live coding and live weaving, arguing that such practices might have potential as ‘practices of the self’, as a means for cultivating a more critical mode of human agency and subjectivity.