Kin / Cultura Plasmic INC

Profile Picture
Birthyear
1988
Currently based
UK
Website
https://cell-less.com/
About

Kae Woods aka Kin / Cultura Plasmic INC is a PhD researcher and multi-pseudonymous artist at the University of Newcastle in Fine Art/Digital Media, with a focus on Digital Fatalism and how algorithmic technologies interplay with agency and the ability to shape our futures. Working with sound, installation, moving image, light, sensors and digital technologies, she explores power dynamics within the digital landscape and the relationship between communication and surveillance technologies.

She is interesting in issues of control in relation to technology (the dashboard, military control panels and underground bunkers being recent motifs). She's currently working on a short moving image work about the history of the button and how it has moved from being a technology of joining things together, to a technology of decision. She is also interested in narratives of inevitability when it comes to discussing technological developments, including Silicon Valley rhetoric and AI hype.

She has been a resident artist with moving image organisation videoclub during which time she produced an interactive online artwork ‘We are not target practice’ that explored the risks of machine learning technologies. With Autograph gallery (UK), she curated and presented a discussion event with titled ‘Social Marginalisation and Machine Learning: defying the labels of the machinic gaze’, and in 2020 was a ‘Sound Pioneer’ supported by Yorkshire Womens Sound Network and HCMF. She has written for Corridor8 magazine, Moving Image Artist journal, Disability Arts Online, Byline Times, The Guardian, Autograph ABP, Musicology Research Journal, Novel magazine, This is Tomorrow, Hypocrite Reader, Garageland, Artlyst, and Arts Industry.

CV
2024

Group show at the Wrong Biennale, Digital Alchemy, Rewiring Paradigms” curated by Alfredo Arevalo, artworks were also physically presented at gallery F De Image, Costa Rica, 2 Feb-1 March.

Paper: If AI is the copilot, who is the captain?

2023

PhD Art/Digital Media at Newcastle University. Thesis: Digital Fatalism. Awardee of Northern Bridge Consortium scholarship.

2022

Resident digital artist at Vital Capacities. Online exhibition Appearances featuring new digital artwork ‘We Are Not Target Practice’

30-min radio programme ‘When a guerrilla choir hacks into your baby monitor to sing lullabies against child surveillance’, for Radiophrenia, artists’ broadcast from CCA Glasgow.

Artist of the Month at Outside In: online interview

Curated and presented discussion event, ‘Social Marginalisation and Machine Learning: defying the labels of the machinic gaze’ with Autograph Gallery, chaired by Dr Cecilia Wee. The event discussed the politics of machine learning, how technologies discriminate and how artists address these issues through creative practice.

Paper: 'Following the I: the business of being watched. Examining surveillance through moving image practices beyond the realm of CCTV' in Moving Image Artist Journal (issue 4)

Paper: Critique of Arebyte’s Open Screen, also with video review, commissioned by Disability Arts Online.

Paper: What does it mean to be seen by machines? Published by Autograph Gallery.

Sculptures ‘Insulated auditoriums’ in online group exhibition Another Space Within, presented by Outside In with Glasgow Museums, Glenside Hospital Museum, Mental Health Museum

Sculptures ‘Insulated auditoriums’, ‘Building up, Breaking Down’ (speculative architecture on the site of Eton College), and ‘I could have been a space to be heard in’ (a broken guitar nestled within a cardboard tower ponders links between architecture, musical instruments and discarded potential) presented by Outside In and Glasgow Museums at Kelvingrove Museum and Project Ability, Glasgow. Reviews in Country & Townhouse Magazine cited my miniature auditoriums as one of the highlights.

Paper: The Struggle to be Heard: music and architecture in Outsider Art. Published on Disability Arts Online.

Debut live performance of Hurrian Cult Legacy at Cumberland Arms, Newcastle.

2021

Cryptic commission for SoundBites online programme, ‘Crystalline Unclear’, presenting an audio-visual critique of machine learning, techno-determinism, and the social implications of pattern recognition (what is included/excluded).

‘With Every Fibre’ presented at Artech conference in Aveiro, Portugal, the 10th international conference on digital and interactive arts with the ACM.

Paper: ‘Listening in Anger: Neuroscience, Psychology and Phenomenology of using music as a mood regulator’ in Musicology Research Journal.

Glasgow Museums and Outside In, one of the selected artists exploring the Art Extraordinary collection (curated by Joyce Laing, an extensive collection of historic artworks produced by patients at Scottish psychiatric institutions).

Selected as a 'Sound Pioneer' for an ambisonics residency at University of Hull and Yorkshire Sound Women Network. Included a performance at Hull’s Middleton Hall.

Featured artist in an online panel discussion hosted by Autograph Gallery and Disability Arts Online using my proposal, ‘DIS_connect: disability, digital and (im)mobility’

Paper: As healthcare data breaches mount, how secure are Digital IDs? Published in Byline Times.

2020

Sunday Sounds commission, Axisweb, ‘An Inward Outlook’ audio replay, a 30-min radio presentation investigating social isolation in networked society.

Video art [TELE] in Model Village, an online and physical group show curated by Hotdesque’s Lizzy Drury and Neena Percy

Participant in Autograph ABP and Shape’s Transforming Leadership, a mentoring programme for artists who identify as disabled and/or who have experienced barriers

Contributor to Glasgow Mutual Aid zine

Winner of Sankt Interface ‘Flying Mouse’ award with ‘A will, a way?’ an interactive sculpture with glove-based interface and reactive video. The piece explores online directionality and intent, how autonomous our decisions are in virtual space, and the blanket criminalisation implied by mass digital tracking.

Papers published in This is Tomorrow art magazine, ‘Shades of Grey from British-Sudanese photographer Femme Inc.’; and Medium, 'We've washed our hands, now for the dirty work: when soap and morals collide', and ‘Free speech and the paradox of ‘censored’ content that reaches millions of viewers’

2019

Cryptic Nights presents Watchtower, video installation with 5.1 sound, CCA Glasgow.

+++Moor Time at the Wrong Biennale, digital curations

Brewing, new commission for disabled curator Aidan Moesby’s Emotional Weather Bureau. Brewing is a video installation using projection mapped global weather visuals, and local real-time temperature sensors to control the sound. The piece explores social isolation, digital connectivity and the relationship between digital and the environment. Premiered at ARC Stockton

Selected artist for Issue 2, Rung magazine, a print and online platform for artist-curator collaborations, run by Isobel Emberson and Frances Kelly (created a video edit of Shroud for the digital edition)

Living in an Inbox, film edit programmed for Strangelove Time-Based Media Festival, event touring to The Photographers’ Gallery, London (23 February), Turner Contemporary, Margate (2 March), Fabrica, Brighton (11-15 March), Folkestone’s Quarterhouse and Brewery Tap (18-24 March). Theme looked at the ‘fast-paced consumer culture of digital media’, curated by Terry Smith and David Gryn (of Daata Editions)

Paper published in Medium ‘Subversion in the shadows: making art about darkness, privacy and the data exhaust’

An Inward Outlook: Loneliness and the weather, 30-min radio programme written and recorded for Radiophrenia’s 24-hour broadcast, featuring my sound art piece ‘Shipping Forecast for Social Media Sentiment’

Hold Me, a video installation on artifice, reality and expressions of emotion as mediated via digital space at Digital Mental Health conference, London

Access Denied at The Foundry, group show curated by Disability Arts Online

2018

Axisweb’s ‘New Art Highlights of the Week’ for video installation Hold Me, 10-16 Sept

Paper ‘Against the artist as brand’ published in Hypocrite Reader, guest edited by Erica X Eisen

Invited speaker at RIXC’s Global Control conference, Riga on ‘the personality as artwork in online surveillance cultures’

Artist-in-Residence at Can Serrat, artist-led space near Barcelona, to develop Living in an Inbox

19-25 February, five day invited residency at Cove Park to develop Watchtower for Cryptic

2017

Watchtower at Devonshire Collective’s Digital Weekender

Watchtower’s international premiere at Luxembourg’s European Convention Centre, Friday Island’s conference including artists’ critical perspectives on Power. Exhibition and public talk.

Watchtower, programmed for Coastival festival in Scarborough

Artist-in-residence at The Auxiliary, Stockton. The resulting audio-visual installation Watchtower uses light as a trope for ‘total visibility’ and the all-seeing nature of contemporary surveillance.

Density at Roper Gallery, Bath Artists’ Studios

Butchered at Norwich, environmental art show curated by Kate Knowlden for a disused green space

Living in an Inbox (R&D) shortlisted for the opening show of the Science Gallery, London

2016

Dead Pigeons and Chandeliers at Ann Street Gallery, New York, ‘Politics & Power’ exhibit
A series of cardboard and electronic works depicting long-term empty mansions in North London which, despite being fitted with luxury furnishings, had never been lived in. These paintings incorporated conductive ink and light technology.

Performer in On Kawara’s ‘One Million Years: Future’ at Guggenheim New York

Assistant in Noemi Lakmaier’s Cherophobia at Unlimited, a project that saw an artist levitate with 20,000 balloons

2015

Dead Pigeons and Chandeliers at The Poor Door exhibition, A-Side B-Side gallery (shortlisted 1 in 6 for Artquest’s Work Week award, part of Art Licks weekend)

Ruin Nation at Doncaster’s DNweekeND, a continuation of cardboard and electronic paintings

See. Sit. Sound at Chorlton Arts Festival, an interactive bench which repurposed technology from a dance mat. Sounds were triggered when people sat down, the full effect could be heard if multiple people sat down together, reclaiming the bench as a social space.

2014

Ripples on the surface awarded Special Merit Award by lightspacetime, and shown at 59 Paintings

Moderna Art, London Wall A series of paintings incorporating children’s toy diggers and trucks to explore our relationship to the environment and how we mark the earth’s surface.

Nesting Instinct at InTransit festival, Kensington and Chelsea, and Hackney WickED, then donated to a children’s charity A walk-in birdhouse with bird’s nest and soundscape bringing the rural environment to a noisy polluted urban space underneath a major road network.

Access Denied at Facade, Open Wall project curated by Blair Zaye in partnership with Moderna Art

2013

Eavesdropping at Walton-on-the-Naze, sculpture trail funded by Essex County Council
Eavesdropping and The Paths We Tread, Sound UK’s rural sculptures tour ‘Playing the Field’. Two installations designed for outdoors incorporating motion sensors to trigger audio recordings collected from rural environments to explore land ownership and attempts to control how Nature is defined.

Music in the Shape of a Cube at Reuse Aloud, Basic FM, an interactive installation using Processing and PureData to produce live remix of a piece of music controlled by the audience’s body movements.
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