Kate Richards is an Australian artist and a central figure in interactive and new media arts in Australia. Kate also founded and operates the commercial media and interactive design company Sparkle Media which provides interaction and installation design for both cultural and commercial sectors. Kate is currently the head of the Master’s Convergent Media program at the University of Western Sydney and will this year work in residence with the influential contemporary media dance company Blast Theory, on an interactive virtual universe installation Eclipse, on the live event Bloodbath, and has completed work for the Bundanon Trust and the Australian Centre for Virtual Art. Most recently Kate has worked on the Wayfarer project – an augmented reality game and participatory performance, the sub_scape series (with Sarah Waterson), and the Life after War suite of works with Ross Gibson – including the Bystander project – an innovative take on the potential for a responsive/generative narrativity.
While its difficult to characterise Kate’s work as the expression of an overarching concern, most of her works explore the potential for frameworks of action and interaction to emerge out of, and then feed into the dynamism of complex systems. New and interactive media becomes a vehicle for exploring, invoking, disorientating, the generative and or affective potential of these frameworks and the social and subjective states they imply.