[ISEA2015] Artist Statement: Kate Geck – R L X:TECH

Artist Statement

Installation (2015)

R L X:tech is a contemporary relaxation studio specialising in meditation strategies to manage the demands of your connected life. Our perennial waiting room features augmented, artist-designed wall hangings that are accessible through a free app available for smart devices. Once activated, it streams a range of guided meditation videos designed to alleviate common psychosocial ailments, such as nerve pain from endless scrolls. Or overwhelming dichotomies of engage/ignore, private/public. A new language of interaction is evolving, and the emerging codes can be confusing (read but not replied), unpredictable (Gangnam Style) and tiresome (#yolo). R L X:tech provides space for you to manage these stressors through the very devices that trigger them. Transcend the anxieties constant connectivity generates. Allow the wash of activity to reinvigorate screen eyes; let hunched bodies stretch out in the soft space. Disrupt the timestamps and binaries of interaction with quiet contemplation and reconnection to mind and body. And if you don’t have a smart device, you probably don’t need to R L X.

  • Kate Geck is an installation artist working with digital and sensory space. In particular, the ways technology can skew and mask sensory experience, and the differences between mediated and non-mediated immediacy. Her absorptive installations are sensorially overloaded with colour and AV texture, featuring acrylic sculpture, kaleidoscopic projections and augmented, digitally printed substrates. Based in Melbourne, Australia she is a CCD artist at Artful Dodgers Studios and lectures in Illustration at Melbourne Polytechnic.

Text with images (PDF) p. 62

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.