Cathryn Klasto
About Cathryn Klasto
Hej! (* ^ ω ^)
///// I am* a spatial theorist and artistic researcher.
My theoretical work operates through writing and critical spatial practice. I often engage in prototype making as a method of slow artistic research. I define prototyping as theorisation perpetually in progress - meaning that I seek to produce conditions for interaction and responsiveness to further enquiry.
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I operate in the field 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 technological infrastructures and processes. While my research and teaching has previously engaged urban domestic 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 currently 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 European architectural discourse 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 currently teach on the international 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 two freestanding courses Introduction to Contemporary Art and Health and Writing and Publishing in Contemporary Art which are taught entirely at distance. The first course, as an introductory level 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. The second, aims to offer an advanced in-depth investigation into modes of writing and publishing about art and approaches to writing and publishing as art through practice and critical analysis.
Regarding research, 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 on the PARSE website.
I am also a co-researcher in the FORMAS funded project The Fountain: An Art-Technological-Social Drama (2021-2024) ran by Maddie Leach along with Mick Wilson and Lars-Henrik Ståhl.
I currently sit on the Editorial Board of L'Internationale's Creative Europe project Museum of the Commons (2023-2026) and I am also a working group member and editor of PARSE Journal (2024-2026).
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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.)