Katie Hofstadter

art + public projects

COSMOSAPIENCE Series (2026)

Cosmosapience is a new series, created in collaboration with Memo Akten, which extends the Superradiance universe. The first piece, The Thinking Ocean, was commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for their Artport collection.

COSMOSAPIENCE: The Thinking Ocean (2026)

commissioned by The Whitney Museum of American Art for its Artport website

Enter: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/the-thinking-ocean

The Whitney Museum of American Art launches The Thinking Ocean, a digital art project by Memo Akten and Katie Hofstadter commissioned for artport, the Museum’s online gallery space for Internet art. Part of the artists’ Cosmosapience series, this project simulates a natural body of water that shifts between fluid dynamics and computational code. With The Thinking Ocean, Akten and Hofstadter explore the ways society grants agency to machines that mimic humanlike behavioral patterns, while overlooking the complex computations that similarly unfold in nature.

“Both poetic and visually striking, The Thinking Ocean invites us to rethink our relationship to nature and bodies of water, in particular,” said Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney. “Drawing parallels between thinking, consciousness, fluid flows and computation, the work highlights the ‘operating systems’ we share with the natural environment.”

Superradiance Series (2024)

Excerpts from Superradiance

Superradiance is a multiscreen video and sound installation, film and performance by Memo Akten and Katie Hofstadter exploring embodiment, technology, and planetary consciousness. It invites the viewer to extend their bodily perception beyond the skin and into the living environment. The work combines poetry, dance, and insights from neuroscience, woven together with code, simulations, and generative AI to evoke a visceral, intimate connection to the living planet.

See the project website superradiance.art for more information.

SUPERRADIANCE: Embodied Simulation (2024)

Chapter 1 – Embodied Simulation meditates on the idea of the ‘body’ and the ‘self’ as a transient assembly of cells, micro-organisms, and cosmic matter, temporarily organized to give rise to what we perceive as a body and a self. Framing dance as an ancient biotechnology—a primal, unifying act that connects individuals to each other and to the living world—the piece leverages the cognitive phenomena of embodied simulation to reflect on bodies as sites of exchange and transformation, and embrace the paradox of feeling like an individual, intelligent being, while being composed of trillions of other living, intelligent beings.

Here is Chapter 1, adapted to single screen presentation. Duration ~4 minutes.

SUPERRADIANCE: Embodying Earth (2024)

While Chapter 1 looks inwards, and reflects on the body and the self as an assemblage composed of trillions of intelligent, living beings; Chapter 2 ventures outwards, beyond the skin, extending the body into the living environment, contemplating the whole planet as a living organism, brought into being through the intricate interplay between trillions of interdependent living organisms, of which we are part. Delving into the rich symbiotic webs of our living planet, ‘Embodying Earth’ journeys beneath the surface, where life metabolizes rock into soil. And then stands up into forests, rivers into the sky, before falling back to the earth as rain, into the ocean, into reefs, deserts, and back into the air, and back into the earth. The chapter weaves together the dynamic exchange between land, water, and sky, highlighting the transformative dance between geological and biological forces, as life both emerges from and reshapes the planet, and how ancient life continues to nourish the present, just as we will nourish the future.

Here is Chapter 2, adapted to single screen presentation. Duration ~8 minutes.

Making of Superradiance

This 12 minute film journeys through the process and motivations behind the piece.

Exhibitions and performances

  • Photo Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Jamie Kraus; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Jamie Kraus; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Jamie Kraus; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Jamie Kraus; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Jamie Kraus; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Jamie Kraus; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Jamie Kraus; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Jamie Kraus; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Jamie Kraus; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Cherylynn Tsushima; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Cherylynn Tsushima; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Cherylynn Tsushima; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow
  • Photo Cherylynn Tsushima; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow

  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps
  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps
  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps
  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps
  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps
  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps
  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps
  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps
  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps
  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps
  • Photo by Jordann Tomasek for Birch Aquarium at Scripps


Boundaries (2024)

Rendered installation view at Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione, Venice Biennale 2024. Church 3D Scan by Scanlab Projects

collaboration with Memo Akten
music composed by Rutger Zuydervelt
single channel video with stereo audio
Duration 8:15

Commissioned by the Vanhaerents Art Collection for the Venice Biennale 2024
curated by Walter Vanhaerents with support from Dominique Moulon

Exhibitions

  • Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione, Venice Biennale 2024
  • UnfoldX, curated by Park Sohyeon, Seoul, Korea, Nov 7-30, 2024
  • File Festival, São Paolo, Brazil, July 16 – Sept 7, 2025

LIFELIKE + LIFELIKE Expanded: Exploring Body Sovereignty in Web3 (2022-2023)

A project involving a publication and a related series of curatorial projects and public programming exploring themes around logging biological, genetic, and behavioral information on a digital ledger, to invoke a conversation about body sovereignty in our technopresent.

Featuring artworks by Edgar Fabián Frías, Lans King, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Nicole Wilson, Oona x Lori Baldwin, Pussy Riot, Sammie Veeler x Mistress Fix, Sputniko!, WHITE MALE ARTIST aka Cassils, and Xin Liu.

The project began with my text, Bodies on the Blockchain (2022), and later expanded into a number of exhibitions in virtual, physical and hybrid formats, listed below.

Cal Poly University + Center for Expressive Technology, SLO, CA (2023)

Press Release, Fall 2023

Featuring artwork by Edgar Fabián Frías, Lans King, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Nicole Wilson, Oona x Lori Baldwin, Pussy Riot, Sammie Veeler x Mistress Fix, Sputniko!, WHITE MALE ARTIST aka Cassils, and Xin Liu

The exhibition also features an interactive and VR experience, presented by EPOCH, and a performance schedule spanning the Cal Poly University Gallery, the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA) and the Center for Expressive Technologies (CET).

Vellum, LA (2023)

March 16-2, 2023
Featuring artwork by Edgar Fabián Frías, Lans King, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Nicole Wilson, Oona x Lori Baldwin, Pussy Riot, Sammie Veeler x Mistress Fix, Sputniko!, WHITE MALE ARTIST aka Cassils, and Xin Liu

See Vellum microsite for more info.

Epoch Gallery (2023)

Enter the virtual exhibition

LIFELIKE x Epoch explores the work of seven artists logging biological, genetic, and behavioral information on a digital ledger, invoking a conversation about how to take back body sovereignty in Web3. Inspired by Hofstadter’s text Bodies on the Blockchain, EPOCH has placed the work of seven artists inside a virtual representation of BIOSPHERE 2, a failed twentieth-century experiment in self-sustaining post-ecocollapse living.

Technology is moving into our bodies, and our bodies are moving into technology. The stakes are high: Will we double our healthspans or create a techno-dystopian Gilead? The artists in LIFELIKE probe the ways information flows between our biological and virtual identities, expand our vocabulary through imaginative scenarios, and use their own bodies to propel the conversation about the role – and rights – of all bodies in a hybrid world. By stress-testing so-called Web3’s effect on their own bodies, these seven artists also invite the possibility that the lab rats might now take back control.

LIFELIKE presents nine projects by seven artists, installed within the five biomes, the agricultural mesocosm, and two lungs of a virtual Biosphere.

Featuring artwork by Lans King, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Nicole Wilson, Nadya Tolononnikova aka Pussy Riot, Sputniko!, WHITE MALE ARTIST aka Cassils, and Xin Liu

A biosphere glowing pink and blue in the pastel sunset, set in a field. Text invites the viewer to enter the exhibition, and artists names are printed in the sky.

Metaglyphs (2021)

Featuring Artwork by Morehshin Allahyari, FakeShamus, Carla Gannis, Claudia Hart, Amy Kurzweil, LoVid, LaJuné McMillian, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Savannah Spirit and Swoon

Metaglyphs presents 10 internationally renowned artists using digital technologies to generate layers of meaning on more than one experiential plane.

Metaglyph roughly translates to “beyond symbol” — an artwork representing the interconnected relationship between object materiality and digital existence. As long as we’ve told stories, we’ve been interested in objects that exist on the border between worlds. From ancient mythology to modern science fiction, our archetypal stories are filled with magical objects that serve as keys, black mirrors of culture and false identity, secret weapons with hidden powers.

These artworks are vessels that serve as a link between the familiar and the unknown. It’s the butterfly pinned to the board, and the butterfly rising above it. Not just the shark’s tooth, but its bite.

Exhibition
Press

ARORA Network (2021-ongoing)

A collaboration with XREnsemble + Pollinate Art

The ARORA network (#MakeUsVisible) brought together over 70 artists creating new monuments, in Augmented Reality, to diverse female and gender-expansive scientists, artists, activists, scholars and historic leaders in public spaces.

Formerly known as #MakeUsVisible campaign, the project is a network of audio, visual and scholarly engagement centering around themes of visibility important to specific communities in their public spaces. Each individual monument in the network introduces a diverse, gender-expansive figure into the public landscape, reimagining our public spaces to celebrate gender diversity and equity on a mass scale.

Visit the ARORA network for more information.

Artists

Aida Bakhtiari, Alexandra Ginger, Andrea Ricklin, Anke Schiemann, Ansh Kumar, Antonio García, BARBIE BLASTER, Bailey Keogh, Beatrice Glow, Betty Mü, Brittany Kurtinecz, Bryce Burrell, Carla Gannis, Chloé Lee, Chòm hõm (aka Asian Squat), Clara Francesca, Colette Robbins, Dagmar Schürrer, Daniel Cevallos Andrade, Elisabeth Mayer, Erin Ko, Eva Davidova, Felix Stöckle, Felizitas Hoffmann, Gretta Louw, Hazel Griffiths, Jamie Burkart, Jia-Rey Chang, Jo Ngo, Julie De Kezel, KS Brewer, Kamel Ghabte, Lauren Owen, Leah Roh, Leticia Almeida (Tanky), Letizia Artioli, MEDIACOELI ART, Manuela Illera, Mariella Kerscher, Mary Ann Strandell, Mathías Chumino (C03RA), Meredith Drum, Merlin Stadler, Michael Rees, Minne Atairu, N3T4 Art, Nadine Kolodziey, Nils Peisker, Oto-Abasi Attah, Paul Valentin, Rebekka Feicht, Rory Scott, Shannon McMullen Studio, Shehara Ranasinghe, She’s Excited!, Shirin Anlen, Snow Yunxue Fu, Sophie Kahn, Storm Ritter, Sue Roh, Sylvia Rothe, Tabitha Nagy, Tamiko Thiel, Tanky & C03RA, The Glad Scientist, VOID PEOPLE, Wednesday Kim, Will Pappenheimer, denkFEmale Art, katiamess art

Active in New York, Munich and Worms.

More Horses than Women is a documentary film on The ARORA network, by Maimuna Anika. It premiered at the Queens Film Festival in 2022. Trailer below.

Climate Clock NYC (2020)

A monument to planetary time and a global call to #actintime on the climate crisis. Co-created by Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd, Katie Peyton Hofstadter, Adrian Carpenter, and built upon foundations of the Metronome, by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, with their support and permission. The first monument was created in Union Square, New York, 2020 followed by an installation at Tollbooth Glasgow for COP23, Glasgow, 2021. The project continues under new stewardship in new locations around the world.

Read the creation story of the New York Climate Clock.

Secretary of the Ulterior, Beautiful Trouble (2019-2022)

Beautiful Trouble is a toolbox for creative activists, and an international network of artist-activist-trainers helping grassroots movements become more creative and effective. I helped edit and craft an online toolbox and strategy card deck, and incubated creative campaigns, including Writers Rebel.

Future Art Models (2020)

An educational program commissioned by apexart, New York, in which young creatives would design alternative professional models for the future which they wanted to live in.

We learned a lot, but one thing that really stood out was that in every school we visited, young people were so frustrated by the story of the solo genius, the great artist. Across the board, they wanted to see models that were compassionate, collaborative and even collective, while maintaining their own authentic voice – and they wanted to work in a world that rewarded those values.

Sleepover Project Room (2019-2022)

A pop-up living room gallery in the East Village, New York.

The Conclusion (2013-14)

Video sculpture, dance and spoken word performance series. Artist Lee Wells is featured in the video, with additional live performance by poet Joseph Quintela and choreography by Prudence Groube.

Exhibitions:

  • Dumbo Sky, Brooklyn, 2014
  • Terror Gallery, Lima, Peru, 2014

Everything Fell Apart (2014)

A solo exhibition featuring a 30 foot continuous charcoal drawing, with elements that could be scrolled and unscrolled, suggesting the terror that can be hidden or revealed in intimacy.

Exhibitions:

  • Terazzo Art Projects, Lower East Side, New York, 2104
  • Terror Gallery, Lima, Peru, 2024

Peanut Underground (2012-2020)

Partial archive

A project and collaboration space in the East Village, New York, where I curated and / or facilitated 100+ group and solo exhibitions. I founded the space with Lee Wells in 2012 and co-run until 2015, after which I ran it solo. Also known as Undercurrent Projects.

  • Peanut Underground
  • Antoine LeFebvre + Jazon Frings at Peanut Underground
  • The Rust Room by Heide Hatry at Peanut Underground
  • Peanut Underground
  • Marcus Bowers performs poetry at Peanut Underground
  • Thomas Fucalaro performs poetry at Peanut Underground
  • Heide Hatry, The Rust Room at Peanut Underground
  • Bookworm, by Farah Khalil and Antoine Lefebvre
  • Peanut Underground, it was small
  • Peanut Underground, it was small
  • Colette Lumiere at Peanut Underground
  • Pierrot Carrilero at Peanut Underground

Kitenic Sculptures (2012-2014)

A series of sculptures bent from Lucite rods heated with a custom handmade heat system. A record of feminine movement and dance, rendered in industrial plastics: a material in our bodies, in our blood, and even crossing the blood-brain barrier into our minds. The name derives from the Greek ‘kteis’, associated with spiraling feminine shell shapes, female genitalia, and the divine Mother in nature. In common usage, its opposite is phallus, a word much easier to pronounce, and therefore talk about.

Exhibited at PS-122, a former schoolhouse converted to a studio building with a ground-floor exhibition gallery in the East Village, New York, 2013; and various group exhibitions

All Night Bookstore (2012)

An art exhibition and book project in which I paired 20 artists with 20 writers to create 40 new works. I created the project and served as the curator and bookmaker, as well as an artist and writer.

Exhibited at my project space, Peanut Underground in New York, NY, 2012.

In the institutional collections of The New School and the Moscow Museum of Art.

Art from the Heart

Art From the Heart (AFTH) is a movement towards community for artists, founded by the Vanderbilt Republic. 100% of the profits are shared by all exhibiting and performing artists.

I curated AFTH for the Gowanus Loft in October 2104, in celebration of Gowanus Open Studios, where I was a tour guide.

Exhibiting and performing artists

FEATURING ARTWORK BY
Myriam Abdelaziz, Jimi Billingsley, Chun Bo, Sarah E. Brook, Tak
Cheung, Samm Cohen, Flavia D’Urso, Anna Katarzyna Domejko, Magdalena Dukiewicz, Loretta Mae Hirsch, Mark Kleback, Sandra Lapage, Marjan Moghaddam, Willard Morgan, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Kevin Nazar, Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, Midori Okuyama, Klaus Pinter, Joseph A. W. Quintela, Bob Rivera, Barbara Rosenthal, SamDakota, Blake Sandberg, Karen L. Schiff, Carlton Scott Sturgill, Fernanda Uribe, TJ Volonis, Andy Wallace, Eryk Wenziak, Dale Williams & Or Zubalsky

WITH PERFORMANCES BY
ALIENS, Thomas Fucaloro, Sara Jimenez, Sable E. Smith,
Simone Tyson, Joseph A. W. Quintela, & Or Zubalsky

AND LIVE SKIN ART BY
Anthony Patorti/Lawrence Street Classics

PLUS COMESTIBLES & VICTUALS FROM
Bite Size Kitchen & Brooklyn Brewery

NO-HOLDS-BARRED DJ BATTLE
DJMR. vs mPK