Drue Kataoka

Drue Kataoka is an artist-technologist-activist & CEO of Drue Kataoka Art Studios, the leading global art studio in Silicon Valley, creating at the crossroads of art and technology and serving some of the world’s top collectors in five continents and more than 30 countries. Kataoka invited Dylan Urquidi to TIMEPieces.

 

Artist Statement

Title: EMIT!

EMIT! is a meditation on individual agency, time, transience, and the inevitability of technological progress pushing us on a path towards the technological singularity. The hypnotic march of an old school analog clock gets enhanced by fragmentary lines of code breaking into chaos. The artist’s eyes (left and right), cloned many times over with varying phase shifts, are in a dialectically escalating duet with the forces of digitization. This human-computer dance quickly culminates into a cacophony of creative energy, carrying hidden messages about our upcoming rebirth as digital sentient beings. Will we be able to carry our humanity forward into the singularity, or will we emit it into the timelessness of history? Are the eyes waking up or falling asleep? Will time without death be relevant anymore? Will beauty, ethics and ontology still hold any relevance, be they redefined, when all clocks fall asleep?

 

About the Artist

Drue Kataoka is the first visual artist and first Asian American woman to become the Clubhouse “icon.” She creates artworks in both material genres such as mirror-polished steel sculpture as well as technology art involving virtual reality, EEG, NFT & mobile. Her time dilation artwork UP! was featured in the first zero gravity art exhibit at the International Space Station. Named a Cultural Leader & Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, Drue is one of the few artists to have been invited for a solo exhibition in Davos at the WEF Annual Meeting. Drue’s work has been featured in Forbes, The Japan Times, TechCrunch, Reuters, The San Francisco Chronicle, WORTH Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, NextShark, TIME, CNN, Deutsche Welle, CNBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, NY1, Telemundo, Barrons, Wired, Blackbook and others. She is a graduate of Stanford University and a social and political activist who has leveraged her art to deepen engagement on critical contemporary societal issues — ranging from #StopAsianHate to racial justice, women’s rights, infant mortality & international activism, she has been recognized by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research & Education Institute with their award for lifetime commitment to social justice. So far in 2021, she raised over $500,000 for social causes ranging from the King Center for Nonviolence, #StopAsianHate and India COVID relief.

@druekataokastudios | @druekataoka | http://www.drue.net

View on OpenSea here.

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