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Kate Armstrong is an artist and writer with interest in networks, social media, urban space, poetics, and computation. Her work examines tensions between digital and analogue systems, and looks to bring digital structures - both functional and metaphorical - into low-fi models and physical spaces as a way to interrogate contemporary culture.She is also engaged with text and experimental narrative, especially open forms that bring poetics and computational function together. In the past this has taken a variety of forms including net art, psychogeography, installation, audio, performance, and robotics.
In 2003 Armstrong was artist in residence at the Techlab at the Surrey Art Gallery and received a New Media Production Grant from the Canada Council to produce Catalogue:Nothingness, a net art piece that interrogates cultural and mechanical forms that operate in online shopping. Also in 2003 Armstrong presented PING, an experiential wireless project, at the inaugural Psy-Geo-Conflux in New York City and later at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania as part of the 24/7 New York-Vilnius exhibition. In 2004-2005 she and Michael Tippett received a commission from New Radio and Performing Arts for Turbulence to produce Grafik Dynamo, a commission which was made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. In 2004-2005 Armstrong was commissioned by the Mobile Digital Commons Network with funding from the New Media Research Networks Fund at the Department of Canadian Heritage to produce Pattern Language, a location-aware fiction project that attaches patterns of narrative to individuals moving around in the city of Montreal. In 2006 Armstrong was in residence at the Western Front Artist Run Centre where she produced The Problem of Other Minds, a voice-activated robotic sculpture which responds to words it recognizes by unspooling a roll of paper containing observations and diagrams. Also in 2006 Armstrong's collaborative piece IN[ ]EX, a distributed audio sculpture, was exhibited at the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) and in connection with the Emergency Biennale for Chechnya, and will be exhibited at the 13th International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) & ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge in August. Armstrong is currently working on a guided-meditation podcasting project called OM, commissioned by I-Projects and the Charles Scott Gallery in Vancouver.
Armstrong works collaboratively in the field of public art with the award-winning architecture and design team at bnode and with that team has been shortlisted for several high profile public art commissions in 2005-2006 including the public art commission at 1 Kingsway in Vancouver, BC, and the Arts Activation Team Master Plan at the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport in San Jose, California.
Armstrong curates a series of monthly gatherings around art, technology and culture called the Upgrade! Vancouver, which was the first satellite node in the Upgrade! International network that has spread, since its inception in 1999, to include 20 cities. Upgrade! International collaborates to produce an annual exhibition which in 2005 was at Eyebeam Atelier in New York and which in 2006 will be held in Oklahoma City. Under the aegis of the Upgrade! Vancouver and in partnership with the New Forms Festival, Armstrong will be putting up ArtCamp: The World's First Un-Conference on Art, in September 2006.
Armstrong has written for P.S 1/MoMA, the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, TrAce, Year Zero One, and The Thing, as well as for catalogue publications. Her first book, Crisis & Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, was published in 2002.
Armstrong received a primary degree in French language and literature from L'Institut Paul Valéry at the Université de Montpellier in France and studied film and television at the University of Glasgow. She earned her Bachelor of Arts, Honours, from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, with a dual concentration in philosophy and film studies, and was granted a Masters of Philosophy in Humanities at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. She has taught at Emily Carr Institute and currently holds a position at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology in the Faculty of Applied Science at Simon Fraser University in Surrey, British Columbia.
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