BIOGRAPHY
Kadet Kuhne (they/them) is a sound and visual artist engaging community through interactive, immersive and performative works. Taking form in video, installation, interactive sound, 3D printing, and 2D print, Kadet’s work aims to prompt visceral responses to the invisible forces that impact and connect us. With a digitally manipulated aesthetic contrasted by ambient spaciousness, Kadet explores our digital nervous system, our human possibility, and the network of ecosystems we live in. Kadet leverages their knowledge of emerging technologies to build transformative and immersive worlds and experiences beyond our own.
Kadet’s works have been presented internationally at venues such as: Museum of Art Lucerne, Society for Art and Technology (Montreal), Sonar Festival (Barcelona), Mutek (Montreal), GIASO Network Music Festival (France), Villa Arson (France), Sound//Space Gallery (London), Antimatter Festival (Toronto), niu: espai artistic contemporani (Barcelona), Madame Claude (Berlin), and select national venues: Sundance, Hammer Museum, LACMA, REDCAT, Torrance Art Museum, LACE Gallery, Outfest, SFMOMA, YBCA, De Young Museum, SOMArts, Soundwave SF Festival, Crossroads Film Festival, SFEMF, Fort Mason Center for the Arts, Shapeshifters Cinema, and Aggregate Space Gallery, where Kadet’s most recent solo show was exhibited.
Collaborative, community involvement is integral to Kadet’s art practice. Kadet has served on the screening committees for Sundance and Frameline LGBTQ Film Festivals, and on the boards of Mediate Art Group, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, and San Francisco Cinematheque. Kadet’s work engages the expertise and involvement of artists locally and internationally, developing projects with artists including Alba G. Corral, Suki O’Kane, Gregory Dawson, mem1, and Mary Franck.
Kadet’s most notable awards and residencies include: Alternative Exposure Grant from Southern Exposure, SECA Nominee Award SFMOMA, Can Serrat Visual Arts Residency Award (Barcelona), STEIM (Amsterdam), and Forward Slash Story residency for digital creatives (Kenya). Their 2021 short film Sym was awarded Best Sound and First Runner Up at Aggregate Space’s International Animated Shorts Festival.
Kadet received a Master’s in Integrated Media and Music Composition from the California Institute of the Arts. Notable independent filmmakers Kadet worked for include Cheryl Dunye, Sam Green, Silas Howard, Jenni Olson, Nao Bustamante, and Tina Takemoto. Kadet’s collaborative relationship with internationally renowned artist Cassils dates back to 2009, designing sound for their multichannel sound installations, video installations, and live performances, including live sound design for Inextinguishable Fire at the National Theater in London in 2015. Kadet has designed and composed sound for all genres of media, with interactive media clients including Electronic Arts, Google, Disney, Telltale Games (Walking Dead, Batman, Minecraft, Guardians of the Galaxy). Konami, Mattel, and Infosys.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Riding on the edge of an environmental disruption, I envision my art practice as a ground for interconnection toward collective evolution. My work explores our digital nervous system, our human possibility, and the network of ecosystems in which we live. In each of my works I hope to give the individual viewer an expanded sense of the possibilities of their own existence, and interconnectedness to others.
As a sound and visual artist engaging community through multiple forms of media – from 2D prints to 3D sculptures to interactive and performative works – I use new technologies to innovate on conceptual frameworks. My work centers around making the invisible visible, whether that involves converting recorded sound waves into abstracted visual representations or exploring transcendence of self and becoming-with others in large-scale, interactive installations. I use our digital mediums to generate noise and erratic, shifting patterns to communicate its “soul” and “nervous system,” reflecting our own systems and processes of becoming/becoming-with. I believe in the power of sound and interactive media to co-evolve one another at this moment of climate shift, of democracy shift, of questioning our place in the greater frame.
Beyond binaries of self vs. other, technology vs. nature, past vs. present, performer vs. audience: What connects us? Despite the structures that define and confine us, how can our bodies become a site of liberation? What would happen if strangers in a room could suddenly be made aware of the fragile and evolving network that we are all woven into? The embrace of change as adaptive transformation is a key focus; we co-emerge, and co-become, and there is no liberation that is not collective. Expanding from the singular I (individual resistance) to exploring transcendence as becoming-with, evolving-together, my work asks: what would it be if we could experience matter as a changing ecosystem that we change, and that changes us? “Nothing becomes unless it becomes with… nothing is complete; everything undergoes breaking up in its co-emergence with other things.” (Bayo Akomolafe).
With my extensive experience as an artist, designer, producer, collaborator, and developer, I am excited to continue reaching the next level of outreach. I believe in the power of art to co-evolve one another at this moment of climate shift. I aim to step towards an intersectional feminist/queer collective reimagining of the conversation around climate justice in joy, love, and transformation.
What I envision creating and collaborating on moving forward lands into and around these conversations and spaces: Theories of agential realism: the universe is living, co-evolutive, and emergent; we create one another moment by moment through encounters (Karen Barad, Bayo Akomolafe, Donna Haraway, adrienne maree brown, Octavia Butler, Anna Tsing). Queer and trans theories of self, hybridizations, queer memory, and queer becomings (nonbinaric imaginings beyond the two expected outcomes of climate change – survival or despair). Research into sound changing consciousness, and my collaborative partnership with Syr Hayati Beker and their search for the queer love language of climate change, and creating new ways of collaboration through storytelling and immersive design.