Kat Austen

Kat Austen creates award-winning sculptural and new media installations, performances and participatory work about the most urgent environmental challenges of our time. Austen’s practice is underpinned by extensive research and theory, and driven by a motivation to explore how to move towards a more socially and environmentally just future.

Kat is the founder of Studio Austen in Berlin and Honorary Associate Professor of Arts and Sciences at University College London. Her artworks have been exhibited and performed at galleries, museums and festivals around the world including V&A Museum, Venice Biennale, BOZAR and Korea’s National Asian Cultural Centre.

At the Art & Tech Conference, in her lecture At the Crossroads: the Tipping Point of No Return, she will address the point of no return and the growing sense of urgency with which we live.

Ice sheets, oceans, democracies, information ecosystems — the thresholds of our age are ecological, political and technological, and they are intertwined. The climate question is a technology question is a culture question. This is the crossroads of our century.

Dr. Kat Austen, transdisciplinary artist, has travelled from the High Arctic to the construction sites of AI data centres in search of the stories of human impact on the planet. Her work asks what it means to live at a tipping point, to know it and feel it. Challenging the assumption that more data will move us, Austen explores what turns data into knowledge and connection, on the road to action.

The conference gathers under the sign of Crossroads. We choose the next step.

“I make a lot of decisions in my work, which are informed by my ethical and moral beliefs as well as my wishes for my own life. Sometimes those forces are in opposition, and that’s when I reach crossroads personally. At a second level, my work is ultimately aimed at creating artworks that relate to the crossroads that humanity is facing – as such crossroads are woven into the work itself.”