Kate Geck. Juried Artist
As Above, So Below
QUT Art Museum
23 June – 13 October
Artist Statement
Impossible Evolutions uses generative machine learning models in the design of woven tapestries, which in turn unfold ways of thinking about the entanglements of human and machine intelligences. The project uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models to imagine iterations of endangered Australian butterflies and wildflowers. These ‘impossible’ machine-imagined evolutions gesture to the futures we face as biodiversity decreases: there will be no further generations or modulations of these species. The generated images are composed into three textile weavings of place, actual tapestries of the interconnected lives that generate each creature’s ecosystem. By reflecting on the interweaving of conditions that has disrupted each ecological niche, space is opened to think about unseen sensory worlds (Richmond Birdwing butterfly), symbiotic exchange (Bulloak Jewel butterfly) and stewardship (Sunshine Diuris orchid). Each story becomes a fabric both literal and metaphorical, with this ‘textillic thinking’ offering speculative vantage points for approaching the emerging relations between human and machine intelligences. This textillic thinking interweaves creativity, collaboration and care: conditions which are foregrounded in textile-making practices and disrupted in each creature’s ecological story.
About the artists
Kate Geck is an artist living on unceded Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung land in Melbourne/Narrm. Her practice tends to the connections between humans and technology, exploring ways to materialise the nature of the digital. She is interested in network culture: working with code, installation and textiles to create interactive surfaces exploring thresholds between the physical and the digital. These surfaces are overloaded, saturated and glitchy, using network iconography and digital composition tropes. Invoking the language of the Internet, this aesthetic critiques a hyper mediated age, creating sites of respite and resistance that think through alternative agendas for networked technologies. She has exhibited in Australia and abroad, with funding and commissions from a range of organisations.
Credits: Kate Geck