Hello! I'm a artist, writer, and coder. I work as p5.js Lead at the Processing Foundation. You can connect with me via LinkedIn; via IG/@xn_ze_ro; or using the contact form below.
Kit Kuksenok is an artist, writer, and coder. Since first learning to code in 2002, they have worked as a systems integrator, web developer, software engineer, data analyst, and lecturer in computer science. Their art/writing is informed by this proximity to technology and its variegated uses, exploring through images and performance how body data collection (voluntary and otherwise) influences the collective understanding and imagination of unseen body structures and processes. Recently, Kit has chaired the "Body Imaginations" track at the Politics of the Machines (2024) conference; and published the artist book "How Do We Know What We Know About Hormones?" (2023) with HumDrum Press based on their 2022 artist/research residency within the school of commons (ZHdK), and initially inspired by their experiences of technological/medical mediation of transsexuality. They hold a MSci (2014) and PhD (2016) in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington (Seattle); they have also learned a great deal from the creative writing communities at Hugo House (Seattle) and the Reader (Berlin), as well as from practicing and teaching yoga. Born in Ukraine, and having lived both in the US and in Germany, Kit speaks English, Ukrainian, Russian, and some German.
Adoption, adaptation, and refusal of technology within work teams has been an interest since my PhD research at the University of Washington (Seattle). Over the past decade, I have expanded my knowledge of organizational change and technological adaptation through experience as a software engineer and data analyst; and through further training at the Hertie School (Berlin) as part of my in-progress MPA. Some of my work contributed to peer-reviewed publications that can be viewed on my Google Scholar and ORCiD profiles.
I've engaged, both critically and constructively, with technology-mediated self-optimization within the body data art/research, but also within the context of individual time management and decision-making. These were very active topics within my practice 2008-2021; now, my personal findings boil down to the following. Some self-monitoring can be a kind of accessibility aid: helping with challenges of, for example, executive dysfunction, or chronic illness management. Both my personal and research interests in this topic were always initially grounded in how technology can meet access needs. However, that positive application does not negate the essential violence of self-monitoring. Therefore, measurement should only be done once there is a concept of enough: will I only measure for a limited time? Do I only measure until some pre-defined and/org qualitative sense of "enough" is met? It takes discipline to do self-monitoring, and it also takes discipline to stop. In my personal experience, both disciplines are equally important.
More recent work (2019-2024) on body data has explored collective storytelling and drawing and illegible representations of body data. In WIP series of web-based interactive digital works, I explore temporalities captured by body data, or suggested by complex systems. The earliest of these works (press play to exit "tutorial" mode) take on elements of traditional visualization design and explore representations of uncertainty, in particular through the introduction of animated jitter, referencing the work of Jessica Hullman in particular, but also other approaches from Data Feminism as an approach to processing and representation of data. More complex-systems explorations are less representative, and rather are inscriptions of specific bodily processes, in this example the O2-CO2 exchange in the blood, with color and animation creating a sense of becoming out of breath. This builds on the idea of autographic visualization - ie, a thing embodying its own temporal process in itself, like the rings of a tree inscribing its own history - which I use a curatorial concept in this are.na channel.
Last updated: Nov 2024