Posthuman Condition in Digital Art Practice – Lito Kattou

This talk will explore how Digital Art, with its capacity to replicate and virtualise our reality, can help to redefine our notion of ‘being humans’. Drawing from the postfeminist writings of Rosi Braidotti, artist Lito Kattou explores the way we interact with the world by creating installations that keeps human characteristics as part of their ambiguous forms, implying in this way morphological conversations and adaptations. As part of her residency for89pluscurated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets at Google Cultural Institute in Paris in 2017, Kattou realised San, an ungendered AI hybridly conceived with the human, divine, and animal traits, living in the Red Lake in Mitsero, Cyprus – recreated by Kattou as a real-time digital environment. 

1. understand the relation between digital art and posthuman discourse,
2. evaluate and question the role of digital art in shaping our ecosystem. 

Speakers

Lito Kattou, Artist

Lito Kattou, born in Nicosia, Cyprus 1990, lives and works in Athens. She is a graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Royal College of Art in London with an MA in Sculpture. Kattou is the recipient of the New Positions Award for Art Cologne 2018 and she was the invited artist for the 89plus Google Residency curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, 2017. She has presented her work in solo shows at Polansky Gallery, Prague; Artothek, Cologne; Benaki Museum, Athens; ROOM E1027, Berlin; Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia; Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens; Clearview.ltd, London; Pierre Poumet, Bordeaux; Radical Reading, Athens and in various group shows at art spaces, galleries and museums including Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; Changing Room, London; Foothold, Bari; Komplot, Brussels; Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis; Benaki Museum and Deste Foundation, Athens.

Kay Watson, Head of Technologies at Serpentine Galleries

Kay Watson is a researcher, producer and curator working with art and advanced technologies, photography and video games. She is currently Interim Head of Arts Technologies at Serpentine and a PhD researcher at Birkbeck, University of London. Recent projects include Artist Worlds (2021), Sophia Al-Maria, Tosh Basco and Kelsey Lu, Tarax’sup? (2020) Jakob Kudsk Steensen, The Deep Listener (2019) and Catharsis (2020); Hito Steyerl, Actual Reality OS (2019); Suzanne Treister, From SURVIVOR (F) to The Escapist BHST (Black Hole Spacetime) (2019); Jenna Sutela, I Magma (2019); Ian Cheng, BOB and Emissaries (2018) and The Serpentine Podcast (2018-21).