Kate Richards

Keywords for my art practice are innovation, aesthetic treatments, platform agnostic,  and user experience design.  I am a long standing Sydney media artist who has been innovating with film, video and interactive multimedia for 25 years. Working in  collaboration and alone in Australia and internationally, my media artworks have widely leveraged most new media platforms and channels, from generative software (sub_scape with Sarah Waterson 2004-2006), Second Life multiple user world (Macbeth in 2nd Life 2014)  to interactive projections (Bystander 2007, Live After Wartime Live with The Necks 2003, Encoded with Stalker Theatre Co 2011, Bloodbath 2010), and VR (The Rocks VR 2016, Bandami Web GL commission 2017).  My groundbreaking collaborations include the pre-eminent Australian database imaginaries project, Life After Wartime (with Ross Gibson, the live-streamed gaming and social engagement project Wayfarer (with Martyn Coutts 2007-2009 voted one of the top 10 “simple, brilliant initiatives, enterprises and ideas that get on with the job of triggering and networking public association for public good” by influential blogger David Barrie in 2008.); a world’s first virtual and interactive Shakespeare in the Second Life project in Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters (with Kereen Ely Harper and Angela Thomas 2008); the live data visualisation and poetics engine ‘sub_scape’ (with Sarah Waterson 2003-2007), and the live video and roller derby data event Bloodbath in association with the Sydney Roller Derby League which premiered at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion in 2011 (with Linda Dement, Sarah Waterson, Nancy Mauro Flude and Francesca di Rimini). I have exhibited at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, The Performance Space at Carriageworks, the Blake Prize Director’s Cut, The Australian Centre for Photography, The Centre for Contemporary Photography Melbourne, the International Symposium for Electronic Art Sydney, Belfast and Helsinki, Experimenta, the Art Gallery of NSW and the Sydney Opera House amongst others. As a new media dramaturge, I have brought considerable experience to theatre groups such as Sydney’s Urban Theatre Projects and Stalker. I have also produced multimedia projects for a variety of clients including Badanami Centre for Indigenous Education, Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, Sydney Olympic Park, The Australian War Memorial, Landini Associates, the Museum of Sydney and the Justice and Police Museum. In 2018 I was busy with projects including producing and co-writing/editing a 3 channel video installation A Drone Opera (CarriageWorks 2019), consulting on a VIVE VR project for Urban Theatre Projects and co-devising the VR engine FoVoE. I am the Post Graduate Co-ordinator for Creative Industries at Western Sydney University and leader of Western’s Experiential and Immersive Research Lab. For a full biography and bibliography please go to http://katerichards.net/biography/