Kathy Hinde’s installations in the exhibition Distant Skies:Pressure Waves are based on thematic interweavings of nature and technology. Their use of fiction, fantasy and poetry opens up the Utopian potential of the imaginary: the future becomes an open space of possibilities. "Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity." [T.W. Adorno]

Phase Transition, a sculptural sound installation, blends the natural noise of dripping water from ice cubes melting at different rates with artificial, metallic sounds to create floating or pulsating tones at low frequencies. The exhibition space is flooded with sound waves: these flow, rise and ebb like water, in patterns that cannot be predicted.

Developed especially for esc medien kunst labor, the installation In Flight consists of cyborg-like origami birds. Suspended from the ceiling, they seem to be gliding off towards distant worlds. Between the opposing forces of nature and technology, In Flight can also be interpreted as a metaphor: with the application of new technologies, to what extent will our bodies become cyborgs? Will changing environmental conditions on Earth force us to inhabit new planets? How do we react to threats posed to social and democratic gains, what new thinking spaces – Distant Skies – are required if we are to develop new concepts for social coexistence?

In Kathy Hinde and Daniel Skoglund’s sound installation Palimpsest, spider-like robots generate sounds and noises that condense into a composition. Drawings, sounds and projections are overlaid layer by layer like a palimpsest, a manuscript from which the original text has been scraped away and overwritten, yet which still bears traces of the old writing. Palimpsest will also be presented as part of ORF musikprotokoll in a concert performance that gradually blurs the boundaries between drawing, video projection and music.

Kathy Hinde:

“I am a composer and visual artist. Combining these two artforms is at the heart of my practice, and fundamental to my creative process. I compose visual scores to create music by constantly challenging and re-imagining what a visual score could be. My composition process often employs ‘open scores’ and chance procedures. The resulting work is generative, which evolves and is different each time it is experienced. I compose carefully constructed frameworks from which the precise nature of sonic and visual events are changeable rather than fixed. When composing with open scores, I aim to define uncomplicated rules, from which a complex system of behaviours can emerge; the whole becoming much greater than the sum of its parts. I create work that combines technology and nature as a reflection on how technology is becoming increasingly embedded in our everyday lives.

As nature adapts in response to its environment, my ‘open scores’ shape the behaviour and evolution of the music. When analysed, aspects of naturally evolved behaviours can be represented by tangible, rule-based systems. I am fascinated with this analysis, and how it is applied in artificial intelligence. It is the combination of artificially intelligent systems with human / animal intuition and the instinct to adapt and survive that I find most powerful and inspiring.

I frequently work in collaboration with other creative practitioners and professionals from different disciplines, including dance, live art and science. This enriches and challenges my creative methodologies and processes.

I aim to create work that generates a poetic and reflective audience experience that enriches an appreciation of the everyday, inviting a heightened awareness of the world around us combined with a sense of how we interact with each other, nature, technology and machine systems. [Kathy Hinde]

“Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it’s own accord.” [John Cage]