Kate Geck

Kate is an artist currently living on unceded Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung land in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia. She works across textiles and technology, using a range of digital and physical processes such as embroidery, knitting, weaving, augmented reality and machine learning. She is interested in network culture: working with code, installation and textiles to create interactive surfaces exploring thresholds between the physical and the digital. These surfaces are overloaded, saturated and glitchy, using network iconography and digital composition tropes. Invoking the language of the Internet, this aesthetic critiques a hyper mediated age, creating sites of respite and resistance that think through alternative agendas for networked technologies. Her recent work has been exploring a 'textillic' approach to creative practice with machine learning models. This uses textile language and practices to examine how interconnection, materiality and shared agency might become foregrounded in exchanges between human and machine intelligences.

Kate has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including major commissions in 2020 and 2021 from the University of QLD Art Museum and for Experimenta's Emergence Triennial which tours 5 galleries across Australia for 3 years between 2025-2027. She has been selected to exhibit creative work as part of the International Symposium for Electronic Art in 2015 (Vancouver), 2023 (Paris) and 2024 (Brisbane). She has published a range of academic papers exploring possibilities for creative practices between human and machine intelligences. She has received a range of grants from Creative Australia, Department of Social Services, City of Melbourne, Ian Potter Trust and City of Yarra. She was selected to undertake a TC2 weaving residency at the Icelandic Textile Center in January 2025 with support from Creative Australia. She was commissioned to run the Machine Imaginings creative community project with the City of Maribyrnong in 2023, enabling members of the community to explore vulnerable local flora and create a community data base to train machine learning models on. With Dr. Emma Luke, she has been awarded funding from the Alastair Swayn Foundation (2024) as well as ACUADS (2025) to produce research reports detailing pedagogical strategies to work with generative AI in the design classroom. With Dr. Alan Nguyen and Dr. Al Thumm she has developed the Body Here tool through a co-design partnership with Fog Theatre. This tool uses machine learning to support healthy motion, social inclusion and creative expression for artists who have intellectual disabilities, and was supported with major funding.

Kate has worked with a range of creative clients on interactive surface design and immersive artworks. She has designed and delivered a range of technology oriented community arts projects with young people since 2008 with spaces such as Signal, Charcoal Lane, Social Studio, and within juvenile justice. She was the media artist at Artful Dodgers Studios from 2010 - 2017 where she developed the Spectrum of Practice model for community arts engagement and led the design and delivery of the interactive media program and facilities. Kate coordinates the 3rd and 4th year Specialisations courses in the Bachelor of Interior Design, and also manages their Placements program.