Kat’s new artwork is a hot topic!
Kat and the team have been researching a site at Solaseado in Jeolla Province in Korea where a new data centre will be built. Today it was announced that the data centre built at this site will be function as the National AI Data Centre for the development of a Korean sovereign AI.
This is a highly sought after development for which multiple locations have been vying. After the announcement, for instance, the Mayor of Gwangju, which has been making a strong case to host the National Centre, called an emergency press conference and responded with tears to the news that the data centre will be located in Solaseado instead.
Kat has been making field recordings of the Solaseado industrial development site since summer 2025, including taking what are likely to be the last recordings of a lake that will soon disappear once building work begins. Kat is composing an immersive soundscape with these recordings for her new artwork THIRST/ For Knowledge, developed at Korea’s National Asia Culture (ACC) Centre in Gwangju.
News report on the announcement of National AI Data Centre Site in Solaseado today
Mayor of Gwangju in tears when data centre site announced in another location
More about THIRST/For Knowledge:
THIRST/For Knowledge, a sound installation + publication exploring water as a communication of knowledge between landscapes, humans and AI data centres.
Working with artists, activists and scholars around the globe as well as conducting onsite acoustic ecological explorations at a site of the forthcoming Jeollanamdo province development of Asia’s largest AI data centre, the soundscape will explore the deep connection between more-than-human and human bodies of water. The work will showcase in November at the National Asian Culture Center in Gwangju.
THIRST/For Knowledge is an immersive sonic exploration of the existential issues, collaborations and tensions between waters, AI and humans. Linking concepts around the memory of water, watery ecologies, advances in AI resource use and hydrofeminist framings of humans as watery bodies, THIRST/For Knowledge pivots around the central essential character of water as a medium of communication of knowledge, and its exploitation and preservation by human, artificial and more-than-human agents.
Image: Kat Austen field recording at the Solaseado RE100 Development site