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 that presence, embodiment and identity were much more rich and strange than I had previously understood. I was intrigued how art and performance could 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, with immersive projections, Virtual and mixed realities.

In 2010, I founded chroma.space as an interdisciplinary creative studio to make work in the entanglement of inner and outer space for different space-times and plural futures. As well as performances, exhibitions, workshops and programmes, chroma.space works with networks working 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 took up a planetary perspective to explore 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, creative modes that slipped the moorings of conventional perception, to explore other modes of planetary perception and questions of communication on earth and beyond our planet.

Recent work is focuses on cosmo-imaginaries and plural futures, working with transdisciplinary performance and art science to invite audiences into the questions of science, society and the discovery of life beyond earth.

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Kate Genevieve is an artist-researcher and Adjunct Researcher at Pūtaiao ki te Pāpori / the School of Science in Society, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

Kate Genevieve is an artist, researcher, writer and educator at chroma.space. Her projects explore ecological approaches to communication and the flexible relationship between the physical and the virtual, the real world and imagined ones. She has over two decades of experience in performance, live art and installation, teaching, curating and devising creative programmes and labs with communities.

She is currently working on Cosmoimaginaries with the Astro Ecologies Institute, and growing projects on space futures and planetary imaginaries in the Second Space Age, including a performance workshop on futures for the discovery of life beyond earth, All Worlds, All Times, and Te Wānanga o Hina, supporting Pacific-led dialogue on relations with the moon and 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.

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. Since making the move she has focused in on her work with cultural networks and astro ecologies. She has also been working on trans-disciplinary programmes, including ecologiestechnologies.com with Schumacher College, and Cosmoimaginaries with the Astro Ecologies Institute, and serves on the organising committee of the SETI Post-Detection Hub at St Andrews.

A note on names...

I work and am known as Kate Genevieve, Kate Genevieve Vega & Katharine 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 the credits. In 2015 as my film and art streams started to blend more and more, I decided that I should use a surname to to exhibit with (Katharine Vega, Kate Genevieve Vega).

However, my original name 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.