Katarina Rankovic
Artist, Writer & Lecturer in Fine Art
United Kingdom °1994
affiliation: University of the Arts London
en
I am an artist, writer and lecturer working across performance, video and drawing to ask questions about selfhood and agency in the age of artificial intelligence.
I make performance videos influenced by online self-broadcasting culture, in which I inhabit a variety of different characters on screen and tell stories from their perspectives (The One-Woman Empathy Circus, 2012–ongoing). By staging my own person as a plastic material, the performance videos become a kind of “laboratory of the soul”—a site at which I can run philosophical experiments on selfhood, authenticity and agency.
Some of the motivating forces behind my practice include current developments and trends within artificial intelligence and politics of identity. In the case of the former, I am curious about what it would take to “write” (or code, or script) an agent, across domains as apparently diverse as human beings, fictional entities and AI. In the case of the latter, I am influenced by social-psychological theories of “the contextual person” and non-essentialist understandings of selfhood and identity, as highlighted by certain striking transcultural behaviours such as “frame” or “code” switching.
My view is that popular attitudes to the subject of both AI and selfhood are lagging behind the pace of technological and social change, and that we are in pressing need of fresh metaphors and intuitions to help us think about these subjects. In addition to the video performance series, such metaphors and intuitions are explored elsewhere in my work, including “Anomaline” (a novel manuscript, unpublished at the time of writing) and “A Ritual Resuscitation of Eternal Lovers” (an iterative participatory reading and online archive, 2015–ongoing).
Current Projects
Aria and the Curtain (2023–2024): I am currently writing the libretto for a choral “séance” in collaboration with composer Steve Potter (Guildhall School of Music & Drama). Using metafictional loopholes embedded in the libretto to conjure the score itself as a protagonist in its own right, the performance work presents an opportunity to explore music’s ancient connection to spirit and airs, or arias.