Katarina Ranković (b. 1994) is an artist working across performance, video and text to ask questions about selfhood and agency in the age of artificial intelligence.
Her practice-led PhD (Goldsmiths, 2022) explored the fluidity and variability of selfhood through a video performance series called 'The One Woman Empathy Circus'. Following in the tradition of artists who masquerade as others, often informed by popular culture and mass media, Ranković assumes different personas for camera by pursuing a state of deep empathy with the others that she temporarily inhabits.
Derived from her own everyday habit of code switching, the performance practice challenges the apparent singularity of the self, problematising essentialist intuitions and offering a pathway into thinking about the conditions for AI consciousness and agency in human beings, fictional characters, and other kinds of agents.
artificial intelligence, performance, social media, popular culture, memetics, cultural memory, character, frame switching, agency, fictional character, personal diversity, social diversity, contextual person, distributed person, selfhood, identity, social agent, evolution, subject formation, authenticity, fiction, emergence, post-structuralism
2024
Title: "Aria and the Curtain"
Description: Research and development grant towards a draft libretto and score for a new opera.
Role: Project Co-lead (Librettist), with Dr Steve Potter (Guildhall School of Music and Drama, composer)
Funder: Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Amount: £8000
2022
Title: "Diagramming the Self: Deriving Lay Theories of Self Through Drawings"
Description: Field research on lay theories of self produced through crowd-sourced drawings.
Role: Principal investigator
Funder: Goldsmiths College, University of London
Amount: £813
Title: "Scripting for Agency:
Description: Departmental bursary towards practice-led PhD project, 3 years.
Role: Principal investigator
Funder: Goldsmiths College, University of London
Amount: £15,000.
2021
Title: "The Writing for Practice Forum"
Description: An annual grant of £1,800 (2019–2021) towards a peer-led training opportunity, organised for artists who use writing in their practice
Role: Project co-lead, with Dr Kate Pickering, Rowena Harris and Dr Julia Calver
Funder: The Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England (CHASE)
Amount: £5,400
2017
Title: "Art to Artillery"
Description: Film commission
Role: Project co-lead, with Thomas Cardew
Funder: NOWNESS, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy and Central Saint Martins
Amount: £3,000
Performance, video, mimesis, popular culture, memes, artificial intelligence, subjectivity, online culture, social media, metafiction, drawing, memetics, cultural memory, code switching, authenticity, evolutionary theory, emergence, computational ontology, Victorian literature, feminism(s), visual cultures, postmodern literature, post-structuralism
Sitian Zeng, "Painting as an Approach to Explore Immanent Subjectivity in the Digital Age"
Katarina Ranković is a Lecturer in Fine Art on the Painting and Printmaking programme in the School of Fine Art. She co-leads Year 3 of the four-year programme.
