Katerina Undo is a human artist and researcher exploring liminal notions of embodiment as processes of counter-transition, mediation and co-existence in complex environments. Her work, primarily through multimedia installations, has been exhibited internationally.
Katerina studied at the Athens School of Law, Economics and Political Sciences, the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (MA in Economics), the Athens School of Fine Arts, the LUCA School of Arts (Master of Arts-Transmedia) and the HISK/Higher Institute for Fine Arts (Laureate). She is currently a joint PhD candidate at KU Leuven, Faculty of Social Sciences, Leuven, Belgium, LUCA School of Arts, Unit Art & Technology, Brussels, Belgium and the University of Melbourne, Faculty of Art Education, Melbourne, Australia.
Katerina's interest in the concept of the “hearing body” has led her to explore in depth how technologies, and ultimately the forces that drive them, are progressively incorporated into the contemporary body. What we once considered ours is migrating into external interfaces. Her work on the ambiguous notion of inner speech has been informed by her research into 19th and 20th-century prosthetic devices used to improve hearing or detect sound, while processes of transposing embodied perception - intimate yet disturbingly coherent - have taken on an intensely social dimension in her artistic practice. Katerina's work comprises more parts than wholes. These parts are unstable, fluid, vulnerable and dynamic. They constitute organisms, environments, networks, clusters, webs and swarms. They are atemporal and atopic: of nowhen, nowhere and everywhen. Subject to their own sympoietic processes, they always already revolve around an alienating I that speaks from a place of becoming, where localisation is non-localised and borders morph to incorporate otherness. Contrary to stable origins, there are no originals or copies, no beginnings, middles or ends, but rather entanglements, convolutions and extensions. Each part, as an organ of technical life, and each whole, as a body without organs, is inextricably linked to all contingencies, alterations and mutations within its context. Each part becomes its own antibody, undermining its defences and re-interpreting its code. It is constantly escaping representation and shifting its sources of origin away from the matrix, carrying its voice from a single body into a cloud - an elsewhere. The process of symbiosis, or the contiguity of the self with the other, is therefore an active search for radically changing conditions of coexistence, processes of becoming or confronting oneself. From this perspective, the subject (which is always already at stake) seeks to open itself up to profound change that involves its own undoing. Embracing its condition and (im)possibilities, the subject dissolves, transforms, invades and mutates in an evolutionary process towards metabolising the milieu of co-constituting relations between bodies, technologies and environments. In these processes of intrinsic-extrinsic counter-transitions, the body often becomes an active site of transmutation in Katerina's work, primarily expressed through multimedia installations. It is within this notion of the body that Katerina's current PhD research explores an experiential approach to the future as a method of human–AI co-creation in response to (un)livable climates.