Interaction Design

— Katherine Ball
«How can we be radical dreamers of utopia while keeping our feet on the ground, or in the water, as it may be?
Some Artistic Research Practices with Water.»

Introduction & Moderation: Rasa Weber

Tue 17 May 2022
17.00 – 18.00
Online
Please contact Duy Bui for the Zoomlink.

An open online lecture of some of Katherine's artistic research practices involving water. This will include: constructing water filtration systems at Floating University Berlin (www.floating-berlin.org) through a series of public workshops, inhabiting an off-grid floating island Indianapolis Island building mushroom filters to clean a polluted lake, living for a year without running water in Copenhagen at Container By, Contaminations a program for people interested in working with their bodies to develop a deeper relationship with water, and oral histories of people living in the Mojave Desert which we learn is Not Broken Yet.

Katherine Ball is a habitat for fungi and bacteria located on planet Earth.
Moving together in symbiosis, like waves moving an ocean, they practice the art of living on a damaged planet.

Their artistic interventions reimagine the infrastructure of everyday life. These have included: living in an off-grid floating island building mushroom filters to clean a polluted lake, bicycling across the USA looking for ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis, coordinating a national day of action to halt business at banks and corporations influencing state laws, and apprenticing with nature to learn the biological counterpart to civil disobedience.

An amateur in the best sense of the word, originally from Detroit, Michigan, Katherine strives to give more energy to our dreams than our fears. They have an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University (2012) and are in the midst of completing a MEM at the School of the Environment at Yale University (2022). Katherine is the ‘Water Filtration and Infiltration’ artist-in-residence at Floating University.