Empty Fields is a sound+movement performance by Kat Austen that roams the exhibition halls of the Korea International Art Fair, Kiaf, inviting fair-goers to encounter multi-dimensional territories of sound. The artist becomes a cyborg traveller carrying hybrid human-nature-digital ecologies through the air fair, their body a fully autonomous and mobile sonic environment projecting a moving, dynamic live soundscape.
Departing from the multiple possibilities of translation of the English word wilderness into Korean, the performance explores Empty Fields as the search for places untouched by humans, the fields stilled by biodiversity loss, abandonment of lands and homes, border zones that feel no tread of human feet. Conversely, the performance takes the position of emptiness as a counterpoint to the hard lines of categorisation by filling fields of data, the emptiness of potential fields filled by speculation and artificial intelligence, AI.
The performance draws on sounds recorded in Korea and beyond. Austen uses bodily movement to weave together field recordings with compositions and AI stimuli to create a dynamic sonic tapestry that transcends geographical and bodily boundaries, inviting the audience to traverse the boundaries between urban and rural, natural and artificial, physical and digital, real and speculative. Empty Fields becomes not merely an absence, but a hybrid virtual-physical space populated with human, cyborg and more-than-human intelligences, ripe with potential for reflection, exploration, and reconnection with the world.
When:
2pm Wednesday 4th September
3pm Saturday 7th September
Performance duration: 15 minutes
Where:
Roaming through Kiaf exhibition halls 1F. Audience assembly point @ The SwingSpace between A & B Halls
Kiaf (Korea International Art Fair)
Coex
513, Yeongdong-daero,
Gangnam-gu
06164 Seoul
Republic of Korea
Cost: Free access with the appropriate Kiaf Seoul ticket
More Information at Kiaf onSITE: Invisible Transitions
Credits
Empty Fields at Kiaf onSITE: Invisible Transitions is produced in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Korea
Artist: Kat Austen
Performance costume: L’INHUMAINE
Studio team: Daniel Hengst, Gyubin Lee
Cooperation Partner: Urban Art Lab in Seoul