The 98^th ARTCaffè hosted Kat Austen.

Kat Austen’s interdisciplinary practice merges art, science, philosophy, and music to craft immersive works combining sound, choreography, visuals, and research. Her installations, performances, and participatory projects invite reflection on memory, identity, and sustainability. Passionately exploring paths toward a socially and environmentally just future, she transcends disciplinary boundaries to create conceptually rich, emotionally resonant artistic experiences.

During her ARTCaffè, Kat spoke about projects on Arctic and Lusatian waters, microplastics in trees, and dragonflies as ecological indicators. Other works address biodiversity loss, AI’s impact on aesthetics, and ocean relationships. Through installations, performances, and collaborations with scientists and communities, she examined remediation, more-than-human perspectives, and post-extractivist landscapes. Her more recent projects use AI and traditional techniques to foster ethical engagement with environmental issues, and she is developing an immersive sound work on water, data centers, and human–landscape entanglements.

Below is a recap of The Talk.

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Kat Austen: I’m Kat Austen. I’m a person, and I make things. If there’s a thread running through everything I’ve done, it’s the motivation to understand my relationship with the world as a human being.

I’ve titled this talk, a little tongue-in-cheek, Really Interesting, because curiosity is what drives me. I’m constantly drawn to the things I find fascinating, and I often catch myself—even mid-conversation—saying, “It’s really interesting, right?” That kind of enthusiasm has shaped all of my projects.

These days, I create installations and performances rooted in artistic research. I want to take you on a short journey through how I got here, a path shaped by motivations that have been with me since childhood. I’m actually quite proud to say I went on my first environmental protest when I was just two years old, still in a pram. And it never really stopped—I’ve been passionate about environmental concerns for as long as I can remember.

From the outside, my route here looks a little roundabout. I began as a scientist, earning a PhD in environmental chemistry and then a postdoc in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, researching pollution. It was everything I thought I wanted: I’d always dreamed of becoming a scientist, an expert, and working at Cambridge. I got there—and it was great in many ways. But I soon realised that even though I was doing what I felt was my social responsibility, I wasn’t excited by the day-to-day. I started to feel I was taking up space that someone with more passion for the work could use better.

So, while I was still at Cambridge, I began training in art—mixed media and kinetic art. When I eventually left, I was lucky enough to get a sculpture commission from a gallery. I went off to Wales, to the middle of the countryside, to work on it. And then, out of the blue, I got a phone call. I had applied—long before—for a job at New Scientist magazine, and honestly, I’d forgotten all about it because I was too absorbed in the commission.

They invited me for an interview, and I got the job. On the way out, someone asked what I was doing at the time. I said, “Oh, I’m in Wales making a sculpture.” The editor-in-chief later told me that’s when he decided to hire me.

I took the job, and for a while I balanced my studio practice with editing the arts section at New Scientist. It was a brilliant role. As my artistic practice grew, I went part-time, and I stayed for five years before deciding it was time to move on. I left, moved to Berlin, set up my studio, and finally began working as a full-time artist.

A few years later, I was lucky enough to take up a residency with the Scott Polar Research Institute, which brought me to the Arctic. My goal was to explore how we might create empathy with an ecosystem under climate change.

This wasn’t a new question for me. I had already been making work motivated by it, and, looking back, I realise it was also quite personal. I had stepped away from science, yet I was still struck by the gap between what we knew and what we were actually doing. We had mountains of data, powerful technologies, and clear warnings about the climate crisis—yet so little of it was being translated into real action, whether at the individual or the policy level.

When I travelled to the Arctic in 2017, we were already approaching critical tipping points. I remember feeling infuriated by the inertia, by the resistance to change, despite all the evidence in front of us. That frustration led me to ask myself: when we already know so much, what else do we need to know—and in what way do we need to know it—to finally act?

This is where empathy came in. I had been exploring its role in driving change and had already created a work called The Choral Empathy Device, which focused on empathising with non-human species. With The Matter of the Soul, I wanted to take this further—moving beyond a single species to finding ways of empathising with an entire ecosystem.

This was quite an undertaking, so I decided to focus on the idea of dispersal in the ecosystem—thinking about dispersal from many perspectives: water moving from ice to seawater, people moving in and out of regions, and even the dispersal of artefacts online and of the artwork itself.

For the residency, I made field recordings and built instruments that measured the chemical and physical properties of water. I hacked these scientific instruments through a process called circuit bending, which let me capture their sounds and weave them into my compositions. From this Arctic research, I was fortunate to receive a fellowship at the University of Leeds as a cultural fellow in climate change.

Out of that came The Matter of the Soul, an installation centered around a one-hour symphony I composed for electronic instruments. It combines my hacked instruments with synthesizers, piano, voice, and excerpts from interviews I conducted in the Arctic about people’s relationship with the land. The work is structured in four movements, reflecting the process of dispersal: in the first, two bodies sit alongside each other; in the second, they begin to mix; in the third, they combine into something new; and the fourth takes the form of a rondo, following a traditional symphonic structure. The piece exists both as a sculptural and video installation—with a one-hour film accompanying the sculpture—and as a live performance.

In performance, I play Arctic water through my hacked instruments alongside local water, mixing them and altering their chemical properties so that the sounds shift live. Each performance is a collaboration with different people. For example, at COP24 in Katowice, Poland, in 2018, I performed with Kasia Witek, a wonderful choreographer, and two dancers. Because each collaboration is different, every performance changes identity—just as the water itself changes throughout the composition. This theme of identity, and especially landscape identity, is central to the research that informs my work.

Another example is This Land Is Not Mine, created during a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies—now the Research Institute for Sustainability at the Helmholtz Institute in Potsdam. This work focuses on Lusatia, a border region shared by Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, which is undergoing profound transition. After composing and performing The Matter of the Soul, I realised I had begun working through some of the ecological grief I felt while creating it. With This Land Is Not Mine, I wanted to follow that emotion further and start asking what comes next.

By 2018, the IPCC Climate Change Report had come out, but still nothing had changed. I found myself asking: where do we go next? What happens when we finally wake up? That’s when I began to focus on the idea of remediation.

The landscape of Lusatia is a fascinating site for this kind of thinking, because it’s in the midst of major structural change. For over a century, the region has been shaped by open-cast mining for brown coal—lignite—huge pits carved out of the ground, a practice that really accelerated after the Second World War. The mines were scheduled to close by 2038, and, as in the Arctic, the region is home to an indigenous population with an identity that crosses national borders. The Sorbs, a Western Slavic minority, have been disproportionately affected by the mining. Since the 1940s, entire Sorbian villages have been forcibly emptied and destroyed so the coal beneath them could be accessed. There’s even a saying in Lusatia, in Sorbian: God made Lusatia, and the devil put the coal under it. That saying stayed with me while I spent two years researching recovery in this extractivist landscape.

When the mines shut down, they’re flooded with water. Amusingly, in a full-circleway, I used to model water and mine tailings back when I was a scientist.

There are ways to remediate the water, but there’s a catch: during mining, all the ground water has to be pumped out, and when the land is later flooded to create lakes, the banks are destabilised. People can’t even walk on them—the risk of landslides is too high.

Ironically, this inaccessibility allows small-scale recoveries to happen. Because humans can’t use the land, the ecosystems begin to recover on their own. In some areas, that has even led to the resurgence of extremely rare, endangered species of spiders.

Out of this research came This Land Is Not Mine, a 20-channel video installation that runs on a 14-minute loop. Individual videos tell their own stories, but they’re also organised as a triptych to highlight different aspects of regional identity. Layered together, a larger narrative gradually unfolds across the entire piece. The soundscape is interactive too—it shifts subtly depending on where you stand in relation to the videos. I designed it this way because it was impossible to capture the entirety of a regional identity in transition in just one linear story. These vignettes offer multiple ways in, and multiple ways to feel the landscape’s complexity.

The videos in This Land Is Not Mine open up different windows onto the region’s identity and its many-layered transformation. Alongside the installation, I also created a seven-track album drawn directly from my research. The tracks are very diverse—many are built from field recordings and traditional instruments, woven with recordings from the community itself. Because this was during the pandemic, I couldn’t run in-person workshops as I usually do. Instead, I set up an online crowdsourcing platform where local residents uploaded sounds they felt captured the character of their region. Those sounds became part of the compositions.

One of the pieces is an a cappella vocal track inspired by melodic patterns common in Sorbian folk music. And from there, my thinking about remediation shifted—this time across bodily boundaries.

While I was still working on This Land Is Not Mine, I was also in residence with EMAP/EMARE at WRO Art Center, developing Stranger to the Trees, a project about microplastics and their coexistence with trees. I’d been working with microplastics since 2014, mostly through DIY science workshops that helped participants identify them in their own local environments. People were always horrified to discover them first-hand. But I wanted to move beyond that moment of horror—because microplastics are already here. They’re in our bodies, and in the bodies of other beings.

So I turned to trees, whose lifespans stretch far beyond our own, to see how microplastics entangle with them. The work took shape as a two-channel video installation with an interactive soundscape, built around a tree sculpture containing a microplastic-infused fluid that glows under UV light. Using fluorescence spectroscopy, I traced how microplastics move through soil, into tree roots, and into the body of the tree itself. Working with three collaborating scientists, we made the research rigorous enough to publish as ascientific paper—the first to document this phenomenon.

Then I began How to Touch a Dragonfly. While doing field recordings along the Berlin Wall route for Stranger to the Trees, a dragonfly flew past my directional microphone. The sound of its wings was mesmerizing. Dragonflies are often used scientifically as indicators of ecosystem health, but that framing feels unfair—it’s our actions that make landscapes uninhabitable for them. I wanted to create a work from the dragonfly’s perspective.

How to Touch a Dragonfly takes the form of a four-meter dome made into an ultra-low resolution screen playing a 360° video inspired by dragonfly’s eyes, mapped through 2,100 hexagonal “lenses” that act as pixels. Inside, you feel like you’re entering an alternative perspective, surrounded by a spatialised soundscape and interviews with people in Cheongsando, Korea—a UN Food and Agriculture Organisation-designated Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Site, where farming practices haven’t changed in 400 years. There, dragonfly populations are changing as the subtropical climate moves north into the Korean Peninsula.

A sister project, Wing/nets, isolates each dome hexagon as an individual pixel, using silhouettes of dragonfly anatomies paired with sounds andphotographs from habitats around the world, extending the immersive exploration of these creatures’ perspectives.

After How to Touch a Dragonfly, I turned my focus to shifts in biodiversity and the rise of digital objects in the age of generative AI. While making field recordings in Bogwang-dong, Seoul, as the neighbourhood was closed for redevelopment, I reflected on the collapsing visual diversity caused by globalisation.

Commissioned for Kiaf, I created Empty Fields, a choreographic performance using wearable controllers. The rig is worn on my body, making me fully mobile and allowing me to shape sound through movement. The garment, designed by Violaine Cambon and L’Inhumaine Maison de Couture, is specially designed to allow this. Field recordings are augmented with AI to become more rhythmical, exploring how AI reshapes aesthetics and daily life tempos.

This preoccupation with AI led to one of my most recent works, premiered at the Galway International Arts Festival: ~~ Not Breaking ~~ This Wave Drowns Hate ~~,which explores our relationship with the ocean. I built a bespoke AI system with ethical processes for community contributions, governance, and data setcreation, investigating whether AI’s environmental cost could be balanced by fostering real-world environmental awareness. The installation integrates AI-generated imagery, sound, and text with bronze sculptures cast on-site at Interface Inagh in Connemara. Sensors connect the sculptures to the installation, dynamically shifting visuals and sound based on visitor interaction. In the performance version, my movements act as prompts, controlling what the audience experiences in real time.

Finally, I want to share my current project, begun this month: THIRST/For Knowledge. Developed through the ACC Creator Program in Gwangju, it’s an immersive soundwork and accompanying publication exploring the entanglement of landscapes, humans, and AI data centers through water, in the context of Asia’s largest proposed data center in Jeollanam-do. I’ll make field recordings and conduct interviews on-site, which will feed into both the composition and the publication. The project will premiere at ACC in November. I’m also commissioning texts from artists, scholars, and activists on AI and water, which will appear in the publication and be spoken within the soundscape.

Today, my days are still spent outdoors, but also in the studio—hacking, making, and composing—always following what I find really interesting.