Artist’s statement

I began my creative life in experimental devised theatre in East London in the late 90s. In the year 2000, I fell down a ravine in Ecuador: as I fell, I had a powerful feeling that the experience “was just a dream” and on landing my body seemed far below me. It was a profound experiential learning that taught me something of the richness and strangeness of presence, perception and embodiment. I became intrigued by how art and performance can stage questions of relational presence as participatory events in relationship with the land and the more-than-human: working first with improvisation and devised performance, and gradually incorporating animation and media production, including immersive projections and virtual and mixed realities (VR and XR).

I founded chroma.space in 2012 as an interdisciplinary creative studio that worked in the entanglement of inner and outer space opening fresh ways to relate to ecologies, different space-times and plural futures. As well as performances, exhibitions, workshops and programmes, chroma.space works with networks on ecology and science, systemic change and transcultural exchange, continuing work that began for the ArtCOP21 in Paris 2015.

The work is rooted in the sense that art and art-making have a unique power to grow knowledge about living processes and speculative futures, and that embodied, relational, creative life feeds activism in real ways. 

My art science PhD research continued to investigate embodied perception and multi-sensory communication in a more-than-human mode. Inspired by the ecological tenet that mental, social, and environmental ecologies do not simply inform each other but depend on each other, I worked with Illusion experiments used in neuroscience and performance scenarios, to create experiences that invite audiences to slip the moorings of conventional perception, and explore other modes of feeling, sensing and planetary perception.

These questions of communication, on Earth and beyond the planet, are the focus of my current work on cosmo-imaginaries and plural futures. Exploring NASA’s Golden Record as a cybernetic relic, transdisciplinary performance and art science can point to technology and communication otherwise, and invite audiences into living questions and radical unknowns in scientific practice engaged in the discovery of life beyond Earth.

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Kate Genevieve is an artist and educator at chroma.space and an Adjunct Research Fellow at Pūtaiao ki te Pāpori / the School of Science in Society, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

inner space ∩ outer space
Kate has over two decades of experience across performance, live art and installation, teaching and curating, devising creative and civic programmes with communities, universities and cultural and research networks. Her projects open experiential engagements with an ecological approach to communication, working through creative practice and improvisation to explore the entanglement of embodied perception, the planetary and cosmic imaginaries.
 
She is currently working on Cosmoimaginaries (Astro Ecologies), an art and research programme exploring plural futures and imaginaries in the Second Space Age, including All Worlds, All Times, a performance workshop on futures for the discovery of life beyond Earth, and Te Wānanga o Hina, supporting Pacific-led dialogue on relations with the moon and our lunar responsibilities.

Kate Genevieve at TEDx Brighton

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Installations and performances have exhibited nationally and internationally at ONCA Gallery, FLUX Lab Geneva, FACT Liverpool, Brighton Dome, Gympie Regional Gallery Queensland, Science Gallery London and Watermans Arts, as well as unique commissions for outdoor spaces such as Lulworth Castle, Embassy Court Brighton and the Crawick Multiverse.

As a research artist, Kate has presented art-as-research at festivals and conferences like NIME Brisbane, iX Symposium Montreal, Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC 16) and IAU Symposium 404: Advancing the Search for Technosignatures.

Kate has presented her work and research at the Wellcome Trust, Serpentine Gallery, BFI and BBC Radio. She has given keynotes and participated in panels, art events, and public conversations with SITE Gallery, London Design Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest, and for the NCCR Affective Sciences Conference and Siobhan Davies Dance in London.

Experimentation and learning together are at the heart of her practice, and over the last decade she has designed and worked on various trans-disciplinary programmes open to all, including ecologiestechnologies.com with Schumacher College, and Cosmoimaginaries with Intercreate and Astro Ecologies in Aotearoa New Zealand. She also serves on the organising committee of the SETI Post-Detection Hub at St Andrews and convenes their Emerging Practices Working Group.

As a curator, she has curated exhibitions and live events, and produced meetings and workshops around ecologies, technologies, space and culture for ISEA, Balance-Unbalance, Schumacher College, Brighton University and numerous festivals and conferences. This includes online performances during the pandemic and LARP work with Furtherfield Gallery (online with Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and with ArTechLaw, online and in person at Hacking Reality, University of Technology Sydney).

Living in Brighton, Kate taught as a Lecturer on the Creative Media Practice MA at the University of Sussex, and on the Digital Media Arts MA at the University of Brighton, as well as teaching across various BA and MA courses at Sussex.

She now lives by a different ocean in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington and is grateful to be a guest in Aotearoa since 2021.

A note on names...

I work and am known as Kate Genevieve, but have previously been known as Kate Genevieve Vega and Katharine Vega/Katherine Vega.

In the first decades of my creative practice, I became known by my first two names - Kate Genevieve - quite organically. However, when doing acting, voiceover & film work, I included a surname for formal credits and began to shift in my art practice too.

However, the name that people knew me by had sticking power! I’ve followed the flow & my recent exhibitions and current writing use my first and middle name, Kate Genevieve . Only film work - e.g. voiceover - still goes out as Katharine Vega, as there is another voiceover professional named Kate Genevieve.