Cathryn Klasto
About Cathryn Klasto
Hej! (* ^ ω ^)
///// I am* a transdisciplinary theoretician and artistic researcher.
My theoretical work operates through writing and critical spatial practice. While I do not produce art works, I engage in prototype making as a method of artistic research. I define prototyping as theorisation perpetually in progress - meaning that I seek to produce conditions for interaction and responsiveness to further the enquiry. While at times my work may appear like art work, it often possesses and alternative agenda and often does not subscribe to the expectations and identifications of a work of art.
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I operate in the realm of critical spatial practice and have a focus within that of interiors and processes of interiority. I am particularly interested in the spatial interior and ethical relations produced by digital technological infrastructures and processes. While my research and teaching has previously engaged non-digital space and interiors, in the last year I have been considering the threshold conditions which occur between the digital and the non-digital - in particular, how digital technologies with particular logics of reasoning and decision making radically shape our non-digital experiences and ontological construction of human-ness.
I am also developing a project titled Diagrammatic Ethics. The project engages in dialogues with artistic researchers and their projects about the ethical conditions they are trying to navigate and respond to. Through the methods of sustained dialogue and shadow observation, visual and spatial diagrams are produced as active tools. These diagrams do two primary things: they operate as documentation of a research project’s ethical negotiations and they support future ethical decision making, both in the project itself but also within an continuing artistic practice when a project has ended. The project, as an artistic research project about the artistic research projects of others’, navigates the territorial complexities which arise in regard to authorship and ownership - what does it mean to operate as a shadow cooperator within other people's research interiors?
o(>ω<)o
To be transparent, I do not have a neatly packaged academic trajectory. I have a BA in Art and Architectural History from the University of Warwick (UK), an MA in Gender and Law from SOAS, University of London (UK) and a PhD in Architecture from the University of Sheffield (UK). My PhD research looked at the networked relationship between domestic interiors and urban socio-cultural, legal and economic exterior infrastructures in contemporary Tokyo. Wanting to challenge orientalist narratives produced by architectural discourse in Europe in relation to Japanese aesthetics and use of space, the research centered the lived interior experiences of fourth generation Japanese architects and residents. The Phd produced a 100,000 written thesis available open access, as well as a number of artistic prototypes.
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In my role as a lecturer at HDK-Valand I am involved in various teaching and research activity.
In regard to teaching, I primarily teach on the MFA Fine Art programme which has a focus on the development of research skills, publicness and the role of art and the artist in society. I teach on both the practice and contextualisation courses, largely in relation to the theoretical framework of publicness, writing as a mode of research, methodological development and ethical engagement. I also currently run the freestanding course Introduction to Contemporary Art and Health which is taught entirely at distance. The course, as a transdisciplinary operation, aims to expand definitions and practices of both art and health, considering the cultural, social, political, technological, legal, ecological relations that exist within the field.
I have recently co-edited an issue of PARSE Journal on Citations with with Marie-Louise Richards who is based at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. We spent two years cooperatively exploring the potentiality which exists if we move beyond institutional logics and power structures which dictate who we cite, how we cite, and why we cite. The issue is available open access.
I am also involved in the research project The Fountain: An Art-Technological-Social Drama (2021-2024) ran by Dr. Maddie Leach and I sit on the Editorial Board of L'Internationale's Creative Europe project Museum of the Commons (2023-2026).
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My central areas of interest, from research, supervisory and pedagogical perspectives, are
( ･ω･)☞ ethics (meta-ethics, ethics as artistic production and dissemination, ethics as methodology)
( ･ω･)☞ space (interiors, interiority, thresholds, enclaves, spatial justice, xeno-spatialities, atmospheres)
( ･ω･)☞ networks (technological infrastructures and processes, research organisation, research logics)
( ･ω･)☞ experimental methodologies (compositional, modular)
( ･ω･)☞ citational practices
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٩(◕‿◕)۶ *pronouns are she/they
(>ᴗ•) (psst: I am not loyal to discipline. I do not believe experts exist.)