Katrin Mayer
Scholarship for artists and artistic researchers at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz
2023/2024
Katrin Mayer’s transmedia art practice explores the historicity of a place in the present. To this end, mainly gender-political narratives are formulated in such a way that they act against the fiction of a “neutral” space. In 2020, as a corollary to her site-specific, research-based practice, Mayer began to explore digital space from a feminist perspective.Katrin Mayer studied at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg and other institutions. Since graduating, she has presented her work in international solo and group exhibitions and has received awards and scholarships. She is a founding member of the Gesellschaft für künstlerische Forschung in Deutschland (Society for Arts-based Research in Germany) and the creator of the website c0da.org.
Rose Intelligence, 2024
Audio text, 34 books
Created and produced with a research grant from the VALIE EXPORT Center, Linz.
The VALIE EXPORT Center is home to VALIE EXPORT's library which contains several thousand books. Katrin Mayer documented which books she took down from the shelves during her stays at the Center and purchased some of them for herself as secondhand books. Her choices were guided by very different ideas, but included topics such as feminism, computer development, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. These pairs of the same book formed a body of material for Mayer, which she then examined systematically for individual sentences whose statements and plasticity appeared to be versatile in the ways they could be used. Extracted in this manner, these sentences continued to retain the inscriptions of their sources, yet Mayer's montage allowed them to be integrated into new webs of reference. Structurally, this work process resembles how an AI functions, but it actually harks back to an earlier, analog stage of development, and enables us to interrogate from this vantage point our everyday life that is shaped by technology as well as social configurations.
