Kate McCallum

download cv
United Kingdom, United States (residence), United Kingdom (citizenship) °1987
research interests: Art practice as research, linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, abstraction, mathematical thought, art and science, art and technology, artistic research, ethnography
affiliation: University of Brighton
en

I am an artist, curator and PhD student living and working in Brighton, the UK and Oregon, the USA.

 

I am working towards a PhD, funded by the TECHNE AHRC consortium, which uses a synthesis of concepts from art, mathematics and linguistic pragmatics to explore the part played by physicality in the communication of mathematics. The aim is to observe, as an outsider, how one mathematician explains their work to another, and so to present insights that can open up exchange across the borders of the discipline.

 

You can follow me on ResearchGate or Academia.edu, and see my growing research blog at infiltratemathematics.wordpress.com.

 

My latest publication is a co-authored paper with Ian O'Loughlin entitled "The aesthetics of theory selection and the logics of art", which can now be seen among the just accepted papers at Philosophy of Science (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/701953). 

research

research expositions

  • FanFutures (2019) author(s): Kate McCallum, Kate Monson, Majed Al-Jefri published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    "FanFutures" is a project working with artificial (AI) automatic text generation in an exploration of fan fiction and speculation about possible futures. It is a collaboration between an artist, a computer scientist, and a social scientist — and, in an extended sense, also with the fan fiction community and an AI algorithm. Using a data-set of short sci-fi-esque stories written by anonymous members of the fan fiction community, we taught a natural language processing program to produce its own, entirely new short sci-fi-esque stories. The program takes imagined futures written by amateur writers, rather than institutionally-sanctioned voices, and dreams algorithmically through those voices to produce its own re-imaginings of possible futures. We then turned these stories into films, films that depict a computer’s dreams of the future drawn from a mass of unknown voices, using imagery selected by another algorithm. The outputs are feverish and confused, but, as with human dreams, we have embraced their incoherence, and allowed imagery and atmosphere to come to the fore. The project is inspired by our collective interest in understanding how humans make meaning with and through others — and how others make meaning with and through us. In a moment when our rapidly changing world, with its mass communication, new technologies and changing environment, seems almost intractable, we take a creative and playful approach to representing this complex intra-acting assemblage of human and more-than-human elements, and the possibilities in our world through sensory experience.
     open exposition comments (0)