Kat Mustatea
Kat Mustatea is a transmedia playwright and artist whose language and performance works enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the computational uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human. She has written plays in which people turn into lizards, a woman has a sexual relationship with a swan, and a one-eyed cyclops tries to fit into Manhattan society by getting a second eye surgically implanted in his head. Her TED talk, about puppets and AI, unpacks the meaning of machines making art. She is a 2022 Artist-In-Residence at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and a member of NEW INC, the art and tech incubator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and co-curates EdgeCut, a live performance series that explores our complex relationship to the digital. Her most recent hybrid work, Voidopolis, is forthcoming in 2023 from MIT Press as an augmented reality book. The project previously won the Arts and Letters Unclassifiable Prize for literature and the Dante Prize for art, and has been exhibited internationally in a variety of digital and physical formats, including at Ars Electronica 2021. Her mixed reality play, Lizardly, premiered at MAXLive 2021: The Neuroverse, co-produced by New York Live Arts.
Future Fauna
Holographic installation
Future Fauna
Digital 3D study of a human halfway in the act of transforming into a flamingo. A provocative re-imagining of our posthuman future, what if our bodies eventually adapt to the rapid ecological shifts from human-caused climate change by mutating into other creatures? We don’t like to think of ourselves as animals—the idea is nearly taboo. Most post-human ecological futures posit us as having disappeared from the earth, usually the result of our own stupidity. Perhaps humans will die off in a catastrophic nuclear war, or because the AI systems we built become sentient, take matters into their own hands and kill us all, or else as the result of rapid acceleration of global warming past the point of no return. What if the reality is a lot weirder? Future Fauna draws on humor and the uncanny to articulate the impact on our own bodies and ecosystems of the climate catastrophe we, ourselves, are bringing about. Human exceptionalism makes us think of ourselves as separate from the ecosystem we inhabit—but the line between natural and human worlds is a false dichotomy. We are animals, too, likely to adapt and mutate physically just like any species. What if our bodies eventually transform so much that we no longer resemble the creatures we once called humans? Where along the continuum between human and, say, flamingo, do we stop being recognizable to ourselves? The Future Fauna project is a provocative re-imagining of our posthuman future that asks: what if our planet becomes a tropical, semi-aquatic swamp as a result of human-caused climate change, and we manage to adapt by mutating into flamingo-like birds? What would remain of our humanity halfway into this transformation? The submitted images are of Fiona, a half-human, half-flamingo hybrid.