Kate Geck Is Bringing "Post Internet Maximalism" to This Year's Gertrude Street Projection Festival

Tonight, the walls and shopfronts of Melbourne’s Gertrude Street precinct will come alive for the Gertrude Street Projection Festival. This year will be the ninth iteration of the popular light and video art festival, which will see local artists take over pubs, shops and restaurants with technicoloured installations.

In anticipation of the festival opening, The Creators Project spoke to to one of its exhibiting artists Kate Geck to find out more the installation process. She’s projecting her work Aperion at the Builders Arms Hotel.

Geck describes her practice as “post-internet maximalism” that blends the technological with the cosmic to produce “glitchy, saturated and dense” artforms across several artistic mediums including "projection, neon lights, knitting machines, digitally printed substrates and augmented reality.”

Geck’s offering for this year’s festival is based on the Ancient Greek cosmological idea of the Aperion, something that the artist describes as a “kind of substratum from which the entire material world emerges and eventually is consumed back into.” Geck hopes to use her festival spot to explore “a metamodern notion of our relationship with technology.”

“We emerge from a media saturated apeiron, consistently subject to it and inevitably memorialised by it,” she says. “Sometimes this is stressful —social media anxiety, overstimulation—so the work is sort of a visual salve to that.”

When asked about life behind the scenes of the festival, Geck praised curator Amanda Haskard for her flexibility in making space for super-sized projection projects. “Because the surface of the Builders Arms is very 'busy'—lots of windows, shadows etc—I really needed to test out different kinds of animation and colours.”

She also told us how excited she is about this year’s lineup. “The program has a lot of interesting work from a diverse group of artists. GSPF has been pretty good with this in general over the years, which is cool because sometimes video and tech spaces get dominated by white dudes.”

Throughout the festival, sites like Little Woods Gallery will be hosting pop-up artworks, performances, presentations, and discussion groups on the nature of discursive experimentation in publicly displayed art forms like projection.

There will also be a live choose-your-own-adventure performance by Uprising Youth Theatre, among dozens of other exciting free exhibitions.

Gertrude Street Projection Festival will continue every night until the 24th of July. You can view the program and find out more here.

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