WHO IS KATYA?
A Berlin and Brooklyn-based learner, artist, and educator.
Shorter
I make sound objects that can be collaborated with, sculpture, and generative and time-based new media works. I teach art and design to undergraduate students at CUNY, a public university system in New York, among other colleges. I also try to learn about cooperative structures and mutual aid (especially in the arts) and engage with others on the topic. When I’m not doing those things I think about cross-species collaboration with my collaborators at Bread Symphony, draw political cartoons and hang out with my dog Ro at the park.
My work has been shown in formal and informal contexts, including back yards, living rooms, Essex Flowers, Baby Castles, The Museum of the Moving Image, Un/Sounding the Relational City, The NYC Electroacoustic Improvisation Summit, Issue Project Room, and Pineapple Reality in New York, Platform Space at University of California, Berkeley, International Conference on Movement and Computing in Chicago,SloMoCo residency and Accessible Objects online, and at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (SoundScene) in Washington DC (upcoming).
Longer
I was born in Moscow and immediately became an artist. When I was 8 years old I moved to the US, spending the last seven years in New York, where I teach new media art and design to university students.
My work takes the form of, oft tactile, sound object installations (objects that emit sound in response to environmental stimuli), sculpture, performance, workshops, drawings, and experimental animation/video. Relying on randomness and other human and nonhuman agents, I often position my sound installations to live independently, authoring themselves and serving as reflexive instruments.
Sound Playground is an example of such object agency. The troupe of semi-autonomous sound objects exhibit forms of refusal to human command (some of them decide they will only work from 5 - 9pm, for example). In a world where humans are used to using technology to discern and attempt to control human and nonhuman systems I invite people to practice being with a system that is not fully knowable to them, a technological system that respects human opacity in return.
My sculptural work from found, discarded objects meditates on the power structures that move us through irreverent, sometimes humorous, combinations of everyday materials. Theatrical stagings or arrangements mimic human, often collective, activities of work and maintenance, basic survival, juxtaposed with found artifacts specific to the culture which we inherited and which we shape. I invite the viewers to reflect on the anthropology of the Western city and recognize themselves as complicit in its making.
My experimental animations/films shift from satirizing existing dominant Western modes of relating and image-making to creating alternate worlds as a sort of therapeutic venting or respite.
On the social research end, I study and experiment with mutual aid, antiwork imaginaries, and cooperative structures. I look for ways to use participatory art and design to diversify ways in which people can collaborate for mutual benefit within and outside of existing systems, especially in the arts.
In the art and design classes I teach I emphasize cooperative modes of working, organize speaker series where students learn about the solidarity economy, and encourage students to continue this learning through CreativeStudy (and Art.Coop).
Currently, I am writing a syllabus for a workshop on tactile art, teaching programming for visual artists and co-teaching a course I co-wrote with my collaborators on designing for collaboration.
Prior to teaching, I spent ten years as a freelance designer and artist in Washington DC and New York. This is where I developed my deep knowledge of neoliberal work culture and, consequently, espoused a life-long commitment to work towards pro-social systems of collaborative nature that free the body and mind for real work, and, equally, for nonwork.
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