Dr Simon Katan
Staff details
Simon Katan is a digital artist with a background in music and a strong preoccupation with games and play. His work incorporates hidden mechanisms, emergent behaviour, paradox, self-reference, inconsistency, abstract humour, absurdity and wonder. He makes software which creates musical odysseys through exploring animated worlds and design games in which the players unwittingly become performers of bizarre and occasionally daft rites.
Simon won a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in 2012 and has been commissioned by organisations across Europe including IEM - Graz, ZKM - Karlsruhe, Borealis Festival - Bergen, Royal Opera House, Round House, Spitalfields Festival, and Tyneside Cinema. His current research investigates applications of machine learning and co-adaptation in the performing arts to facilitate accessibility.
Academic qualifications
- PhD Music Composition Brunel University 2012
- Mmus Music Composition 1:1 Goldsmiths 2005
- Bmus Music Performance 2:1 RWCMD 2001
Teaching
- Head of Creative Computing – Goldsmiths 2015-Present
- Lecturer 0.5 – Goldsmiths 2014-Present
- Sessional Lecturer – Ravensbourne 2013-14
- Sessional Lecturer – SAE 2014
- Sessional Lecturer – LSBU 2013-2015
Areas of supervision
- Audio Visual Composition
- Digital Performance
Professional activities
‘Where Am I ?’ 2014 - dancedigital commission, created by Marguerite Galizia in collaboration with Simon Katan and performed by Daniel Watson. The project was funded by the National Lottery through the Arts Council England. The piece was performed at Resolution Festival in 2014 to critical acclaim.
‘Don’t Look Back’ audio only adventure game which was commissioned by the Royal Opera House 2014 and nominated for a Lovie award in 2015
‘Spidersonics’ 2014 – I was a research assistant on this iPad app designed with accessibility in mind to enable young people of all ages and abilities to get creative with sound. Developed by Embodied Audio Visual Interaction Group Goldsmiths.
Featured work
- Katan, S, Grierson, M, Fiebrink R, 2015 Using Interactive Machine Learning to Support Interface Development Through Workshops with Disabled People Proc. CHI
Publications and research outputs
Article
Katan, Simon. 2016. Using Interactive Machine Learning to Sonify Visually Impaired Dancers’ Movement. Proceedings of MOCO'16, July 05 - 07, 2016, Thessaloniki, GA, Greece,
Perry, Phoenix and Katan, Simon. 2016. User-Defined Gestural Interactions Through Multi-Modal Feedback. TEI BodySenseUX Workshop on Full-Body and Multisensory Experience,
Katan, Simon; Grierson, Mick and Fiebrink, Rebecca. 2015. Using Interactive Machine Learning to Support Interface Development Through Workshops with Disabled People. CHI 2015, April 18 - 23, 2015, Proceedings,
Conference or Workshop Item
Katan, Simon and Anstead, Edward. 2020. 'Work In Progress: Sleuth, a programming environment for testing gamification'. In: 2020 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON). Porto, Portugal 27 - 30 April 2020.
Perry, Phoenix and Katan, Simon. 2016. 'User-Defined Gestural Interactions Through Multi-Modal Feedback'. In: Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interaction. Eindhoven, Netherlands 14 -17 Feb 2016.
Katan, Simon; Grierson, Mick and Fiebrink, Rebecca. 2015. 'Using Interactive Machine Learning to Support Interface Development Through Workshops with Disabled People'. In: CHI 2015. Seoul, Korea, Republic of.
Katan, Simon; Grierson, Mick and Fiebrink, Rebecca. 2015. 'Using Interactive Machine Learning to Support Interface Development Through Workshops with Disabled People'. In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). Seoul, Korea, Republic of 18-23 April 2015.
Performance
Katan, Simon and Fraser, Luke. 2018. Clamour. In: "Clamour at Camden Roundhouse", Sackler Space - Roundhouse Camden, United Kingdom, 22 November 2018.
