#PERFORMANCE #INSTALLATION #SOUND #PARTICIPATORY #CLIMATE #ENVIRONMENT #EMBODIMENT
When Plants Migrate
Sookyun Yang x Kat Austen
As part of Homo Migratio, Jeju Museum of Art in Jeju Stone Culture Park
19th September 2023 – 26th November 2023
When Plants Migrate Austen’s 4 channel sound installation will be presented in collaboration with Sookyun Yang’s immersive video work of the same name.
The compilation Solidarity Fund · Hydro is published!
We deeply hope with this compilation to receive donations to support the Volunteer Fire Fighting Society, Črna na Koroškem – from a part of Slovenia that was heavily damaged by recent floods.
https://kamizdat.bandcamp.com/album/solidarity-fund-hydro
Solidarity Fund · Hydro
In the wake of devastating floods that hit Slovenia in early August, many find themselves without homes and irreplaceable memories. In partnership with Kamizdat Label, we wish to lend a helping hand to these resilient people by curating an online audio compilation that features the generous contributions of artists who have donated their music to this cause. All financial contributions from the sale of the compilation will be sent to the flood relief fund of the Volunteer Fire Fighting Society, Črna na Koroškem. Our hearts go to those who depend on gestures of solidarity at the time of our planetary transformations.
—
Solidarnostni sklad · Hidro
Po uničujočih poplavah, ki so Slovenijo prizadele v začetku avgusta, so mnogi ostali brez domov in nenadomestljivih spominov. V sodelovanju z založbo Kamizdat želimo tem vztrajnim ljudem ponuditi pomoč s spletno zvočno kompilacijo, na kateri so zbrani prispevki umetnikov, ki so za ta namen darovali svojo glasbo. Vse finančne prispevke od prodaje kompilacije bomo nakazali v sklad Prostovoljnega gasilskega društva Črna na Koroškem. Naša srca so z vsemi, ki so odvisni od solidarnostnih gest v času naših planetarnih sprememb.
OR poiesis · Tsuki no jūryoku
Brandon LaBelle · Planetary Listening
Brane Zorman · The Tree Spirits I Touch (excerpt)
Bojana Šaljić P. · The Last Animal / Ujjayi *
Toni Dimitrov · A Night at Letea
Karmen Ponikvar · Look, the snowflakes are moving upwards (excerpt)
Mauricio Valdés San Emeterio · Ejarbe **
Dronišnica · It’s Time to Drink Water
Kikiriki · Drop
Brgs · Mushroom Therapy (remix)
Irena Pivka · EchoWalk
Kat Austen · Multifurcation (Movement 4 from The Matter of the Soul Symphony)
Hugo Lioret · Interchange [43.961436, 1.019804]
Lena Ortega · Dandelion
David Bilek · Intermezzo for a Confused Dragonfly
mʊdʌki · soft txt I
mʊdʌki · soft txt II
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec · Lost Algoritmhs
Saša Spačal · Anatomy of a Symbiosis: Slicing 12
Miha Godec · Echoing Tides
Shekuza · Stay Strong
AGF · Elemental Slovenia
Zergon · Pralik
Sujevera · River Tensions
Manja Ristić · Schwarze Aist [Austrian––Czech Borderlands, July 2023]
Luka Prinčič ·coHydrogen
beepblip · Voluminous Movement of a Watery Earth (excerpt)
Robertina Šebjanič · hydro_Agitations
* Ocean breath
** Increase of the volume of water in rivers due to heavy rainfall.
credits
released September 1, 2023
Robertina Šebjanič, Ida Hiršenfelder · curators, graphic design
Luka Prinčič · mastering
Luka T. Zagoričnik, Luka Prinčič · executive production, promotion
City of Ljubljana · financial support
cat.no: KAM067
Produced by Emanat
Released by Kamizdat
kamizdat.si
created by
AGF — antyegreie.com
beepblip (Ida Hiršenfelder) — beepblip.org
Brandon LaBelle — brandonlabelle.net
Brane Zorman — www.branezorman.si
Brgs — jakaberger.com
Bojana Šaljić P. — www.facebook.com/bojana.saljic
David Bilek — soundcloud.com/davidbilek
Dronišnica — soundcloud.com/droni-nica
Hugo Lioret — hugolioret.com
Irena Pivka — www.irenapivka.si
Kat Austen — www.katausten.com
Karmen Ponikvar — soundcloud.com/karmen_p
Kikiriki — kikiriki.bandcamp.com
Lena Ortega — www.leenalee.net
Luka Prinčič — lukaprincic.si
Manja Ristić — manjaristic.bandcamp.com
Mauricio Valdés San Emeterio — soundcloud.com/mauricio-valdes-san-emeterio
Miha Godec — godec.art
mʊdʌki — www.works.io/polina-khatsenka
OR poiesis — orpoiesis.blogspot.com
Robertina Šebjanič — robertina.net
Saša Spačal — www.agapea.si/en/
Shekuza — soundcloud.com/shekuza
Sujevera — www.instagram.com/_sujevera_/
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec — www.taogvs.org
Toni Dimitrov — elanvital.bandcamp.com
Zergon — zergon.org
In 2017 Kat went to Nunavut in the Arctic on a residency with Friends of Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, to carry out artistic research into the reaction of ice and water to the climate crisis through sound. It was for this residency that Kat developed circuit bent instruments from scientific equipment usually used to measure chemical and physical properties of water, like temperature and acidity. Kat used these to listen to the process of measurement, as a comment on not only the rapidly changing Arctic environment, but also the datafication of human relations to environmental catastrophe.
The resulting work, The Matter of the Soul, has been featured on the BBC and performed around the globe including at COP24 in 2018 as part of the Greenpeace ClimateHub in Katowice.
Kat has gone on to apply these instruments to many other environments and ecosystems, including Lausitz for This Land Is Not Mine and liminal landscapes as part of my compositions for Mapping Gender.
She will be presenting this work on 31st August as part of the Sounding Elements convened by Samuel Hertz, Sasha Englemann and Indira Lemouci at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference.
19th May 2023
8pm
dotolim, Mapo-gu, Seoul
Kat will perform her album This Land is Not Mine as part of the dotolim concert series.
dotolim is a longstanding experimental music venue and recording studio run by Jin Sangtae, which hosts performances and concerts with people with different perspectives in various fields, as well as film screenings and exhibitions.
The “This Land is Not Mine” LP combines 7 songs by musician and sound artist Kat Austen. Austenmelds acoustic and electronica with field recordings, in this homage to a landscape ravaged by open cast mining: Lusatia, at the German-Polish border. Realised over the course of 2 years, This Land is Not Mine is a modern-day protest album, telling the stories of villages lost to the past, rivers that harbour secrets and communities that rebuild in the wake of mine closures.
Austen’s musical roots hail back to classical piano, metal and folk. Since 2018, Austen has been releasing music that mixes field recordings and ambient electronic sounds with traditional instruments to create a unique and evocative sonic tapestry.
Some field recordings for the album were gathered through a crowdsourcing platform Lausitzklang that explores the sounds of Lusatia.
“Co-designing Infrastructures: Community collaboration for liveable cities” by Sarah Bell, Charlotte Johnson, Kat Austen, Gemma Moore, and Tse-Hui Teh
ISBN: 9781800082229
Publication: April 27, 2023
Series: Engaging Communities in City-making
Published by Open Access by UCL Press
DOWNLOAD From the UCL Press site
Co-designing Infrastructures tells the story of a research programme designed to bring the power of engineering and technology into the hands of grassroots community groups, to create bottom-up solutions to global crises. Four projects in London are described in detail, exemplifying community collaboration with engineers, designers and scientists to enact urban change. The projects co-designed solutions to air pollution, housing, the water-energy-food nexus, and water management. Rich case-study accounts are underpinned by theories of participation, environmental politics and socio-technical systems. The projects at the heart of the book are grounded in specific settings facing challenges familiar to urban communities throughout the world. This place-based approach to infrastructure is of international relevance as a foundation for urban resilience and sustainability. The authors document the tools used to deliver this work, providing guidance for others who are working to deliver local technical solutions to complex social and environmental problems around the world.This is a book for engineers, designers, community organisers and researchers. Co-authored by researchers, it includes voices of community collaborators, their experiences, frustrations and aspirations. It explores useful theories about infrastructure, engineering and resilience from international academic research, and situates them in community-based co-design experience, to explain why bottom-up approaches are needed and how they might succeed.
REVEIL 24+1 HOUR BROADCAST 2023
5AM London time (UTC+1) on Saturday 6 MAY to 6AM on Sunday 7 MAY 2023
I’m delighted to be hosting a stream from Seoul, South Korea, for Reveil 2023.
Reveil travels West on live audio feeds from streamers around the world at daybreak, making a loop over one earth day.
Reveil (2014—) is a collective production by streamers at listening points around the earth. Starting on the morning of Saturday 6 May in South London near the Greenwich Meridian, the broadcast will pick up feeds one by one, tracking the sunrise west from microphone to microphone, following the wave of intensified sound that loops the earth every 24 hours at first light.
Streams come from a variety of locations, at a time of day when human sounds are relatively low, even in dense urban areas. This tends to open the sound field to a more diverse ecology than usual. The Reveil broadcast makes room by largely avoiding speech and music, gravitating to places where human and non human communities meet and soundworlds overlap.
Each stream brings something different to the loop.
REVEIL 10 goes back to its starting point, giving attention to live sounds of places as first light reaches them.
Flow Over Water Borders (2019)
Walls Have Ears
ARS Art Factory
Tallinn, Estonia
10th – 18th February 2023
“Flow Over Water Borders” by Kat Austen is presented as a 4-channel sound installation that explores fluidity of identity in relation to borders. Paracelsus famously said of all substances “It is only the dose which makes a thing poison.” Borders constrain and divide, they are often contested, policed, enforced. Yet they also protect, define, collect… Their value is in the way that they and their permeability are navigated.
Drawing parallels between urban life for young people and the changes to water as it passes through the city, this sound artwork sheds light on the meaning of boundaries, the fluid nature of the self and the eternal navigation of the individual as part of society.
The artwork is based on participatory artistic research focussed on the Panke River in Berlin with local school pupils. Realised through DIY Hack the Panke’s Science by Doing with Art Laboratory Berlin.
Festival Website Walls Have Ears / Sientel On Korvad
More information Flow Over Water Borders
More information Science by Doing at Art Laboratory Berlin’s site
Mapping Gender Performance
Sat 18 Feb 2023 at 7:30 pm
Worthing Museum and Art Gallery,
Chapel Road,
Worthing,
West Sussex, BN11 1HP, UK
We’re delighted that Anders will be performing Mapping Gender with Kat’s soundscape in the Main Gallery at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery in February.
Mapping Gender is a multisensory exhibition of dance, image, scent, sound and research. It’s an invitation to explore the parallels between cartography and historical clothing through a lens of non-binary experiences. Created by Anders Duckworth in collaboration with sound artist Kat Austen, Mapping Gender looks at landscapes, the way we draw borders and create boundaries on maps to carve up geographical space whilst also asking us to explore how we look at the body and how we use gender to carve and divide people.
More information and tickets
Read the interview with Anders Duckworth on the Worthing Theatres and Art Museum blog
Members pre-sale Tuesday 13 September, 10am
General on-sale Friday 16 September, 10am
We are thrilled to announce the publication of Kat’s book Fossil Echoes, which draws together two of my artworks that look at the consequences of human addiction to fossil fuels. On one side, This Land is Not Mine about brown coal mining and its effect on landscape and culture. On the other, Stranger to the Trees about how microplastics created from oil interact with trees.
This bi-lingual (German / English) limited edition publication has a Foreword by artist and curator Dominika Kluszczyk with translation by Vanessa Kreitlow. It is printed by Umweltdruck in Berlin and is also available as a pdf under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.
The publication was funded as part of the Neustart Kulture Module C funding afforded for Stranger to the Trees by BBK Berlin.
Kat’s essay, commissioned by the Against Catastrophe research project, has been published in the project’s most recent edition, the Energy Dispatch. The article draws on Kat’s research for This Land is Not Mine to explore what secrets post-extractive landscapes reveal for a sustainable future.
“There is something captivating about destruction on an epic scale. The horror of it draws the eye and ear, pulling focus. Looking out across acres of scarred earth at the open cast lignite mine of Janschwalde near Cottbus / Chóśebuz in Lausitz (Lusatia in English) by the German-Polish border, the sheer magnitude of the anthropogenic change visited on the landscape is magnificent and catastrophic. Yet, scale and perspective are key here. Is it possible to look beyond this immensity and find that, at other scales and in other timeframes, there are stories evolving that transcend catastrophe?”
Energy Dispatch is the second online publication drop on the website of our multimodal research project, ‘Against Catastrophe’.
The aim of Against Catastrophe is to interrogate the concept of catastrophe and explore anti-catastrophic practices to expose the longer-term structural causes and implications of catastrophes and catastrophic thinking, rhetoric, and imaginaries. The focus throughout is on how novel approaches
in design, architecture, and technology can open possibilities for navigating a catastrophic world, but also expand epistemic horizons beyond apocalyptic thinking. The project outputs include an edited volume, offline and online exhibitions, and a series of online publications, called ‘Dispatches’.
In the second dispatch on “Energy” edited by Johanna Mehl and Moritz Ingwersen contributors seek out remediations of catastrophe that reject the dichotomy of utopia and apocalypse to foreground the uneasy and ambiguous emplacements of energy, where shifting constellations of power and the imagination, more-than-human ecologies and socio-technical infrastructures continuously intersect. You can read the full editorial statement here.
Kat’s article is based on her research for This Land is Not Mine installation and This Land is Not Mine album, supported by the IASS Potsdam Artist Fellowship 2020.
‘Against Catastrophe’ is led by Dr. Orit Halpern, Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden. The core project team led by Sudipto Basu is based out of Concordia University (Montreal), MIT, and TU Dresden. With illustrations and design treatment by T.S. Halpern.
‘Against Catastrophe’ is funded by Fonds de recherche du Québec and the Swiss National Science Foundation, and is part of the larger Governing Through Design research cluster.