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.

Publication: Live coding - a user's manual


I am currently working on a forthcoming publication Live coding - a user's manual (working title), co-authored with Alan Blackwell, Professor, Interdisciplinary Design, University of Cambridge; Geoff Cox, Associate Professor, Department of Aesthetics, Aarhus University; Alex McLean, Research Fellow, Scientific Research in Music, Leeds University; Thor Magnusson, Lecturer in Music, University of Sussex.

Brief Description: Live coding has emerged over the past decade as a dynamic creative practice that has gained attention across cultural and technical fields – from music and the visual arts through to computer science. It is broadly defined as improvised interactive programming, typically but not exclusively to create electronic music or video, and performed live in public. The proposed book, Live coding - a user's manual, is structured as a multi-authored comprehensive introduction to the field of live coding and a broader cultural commentary on its potential to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. The phrase ‘live coding’ - referring to the use of interactive programming languages in performing arts - becomes the starting point for analysis and the overall project of the book; first examining coding practices as live events, and secondly examining the relatively understated question of temporality in coding. In addition to its particular technical and aesthetic qualities, the book argues that the practice of live coding raises wider contemporary concerns, related to the human–machine relation and to conditions of liveness and real-time processes. Indeed it deals centrally with the experience of time, and the various possibilities for change and action that the practice of coding allows. In this sense the book makes the central claim that live coding provides an example of what it means to be ‘operative’ and to be ‘radically present’ in the world.