Katrin Hochschuh and Adam Donovan
Katrin Hochschuh and Adam Donovan met in 2016 through a mutual network of artists, architects and researchers in Zurich, Switzerland.
Katrin Hochschuh is a media artist with an architectural background in digital design and robotic fabrication. Her artwork connects the digital and the physical realm, exploring robotic behaviours, algorithms and interactivity, always seeing the human, his perception and social implications of technology at the center of her work. Writing her own software allows her to connect deeply with technology and to implement her ideas and concepts without constraints.
Adam Donovan is a hybrid media artist working in the area of science, art and technology. His artwork incorporates nonlinear acoustics, robotic sculpture, game engine environments and camera tracking. Donovan pioneered work into ultrasonics and acoustic beamforming as an artist in residence with the Defense science and technology organization in Australia since 2001. He explores the intangible aspects of physics to amplify their effects creating new mediums and experiences. Specializing in designing custom hardware and his own electronic circuits his creativity has no bounds in creating new robotic companions.
As a duo Hochschuh and Donovan amplify their strengths of working in software and hardware, combining matter and information in their unexpected artworks. Since first prototypes in 2018 during their EMARE residency with Kontejner in Zagreb, they research and develop their ongoing project Empathy Swarm which premiered as a swarm of 50 robots at QUT Art Museum in Brisbane in 2019. At the intersection of technical and conceptual development, they showed different iterations as Performative Installation at WRO Media Art Biennale 2019 and HEK’s Oslo Night 2020.
As an answer to the Covid pandemic, they fostered an online version of Empathy Swarm with the title “Telerobotics for Social Interaction as a Symbiotic Reminiscence of Human-Machine Cohabitation” in a collaboration with Impakt’s online exhibition “Cyborg Futures” 2020.
Their directional sound robot with real time projections “Curious Tautophone – Tensor field Ontology” is touring Australia as part of Experimenta Make Sense – Triennial of Media Art since 2017. In parallel to their exhibitions, Hochschuh and Donovan collaborate with Łukasz Szałankiewicz under the name of “Saturn 3” combining experimental sound with sound robots and real-time projections in performances at major European Sound art festivals.
Together Hochschuh and Donovan create sophisticated robotic mechanisms that play with the unobtrusive uncanny systems within us. Their works and machines invoke an otherness or timelessness that is only present in the here and now.
k.hochschuh.de adamdonovan.net