AliaK, also known as Kath O'Donnell, is an Australian artist whose vibrant, wide-ranging projects share a common thread: she repeatedly reshapes the past into futuristic forms. Her work spans drawing, generative code, and physical sculpture, much of which she has placed on the blockchain.
O'Donnell studied science, electrical engineering, and IT before working in technical roles at television and streaming companies.She first encountered generative and video art at Newcastle, Australia's annual This is Not Art festival, which she began attending in 2002 after relocating from Brisbane to Sydney.In 2013 she returned to university, beginning with a textiles course and then, from 2015, studying Fine Art and Visual Culture, a degree she went on to complete.,A 2019 breakthrough came from querying the API of a Yahoo Groups email list as it was about to shut down, using its messages to generate drawings that she then extruded into 3D-printed objects, reimagining the list's placeless online space as an imaginary city. Some of these images were among her first works minted on Hic et Nunc.Early in her involvement with NFTs, she discovered Tezos and Hic et Nunc through community debates over its lower environmental footprint compared to Ethereum, and shifted most of her minting there and to companion platforms such as fxhash.
For her final-year university project, she began putting endangered and extinct species from her home state onto the blockchain in a series she calls specture, intending it as a possible last remaining record of them. The generative works use blockchain metadata as material and often incorporate deliberate errors or glitches to reflect the imperfections of digitising physical specimens.Alongside specture, she has explored String Figures, drawing on Donna Haraway's writing on speculative fabulation to treat the string patterns as both drawings and stories. Her process, which she calls “driftings in drawings”, draws on the Situationist International's idea of the dérive, wandering to discover unplanned connections within a place. She works in both physical and digital media partly because she has aphantasia and cannot picture images mentally, so making 3D models and printed objects lets her see and weigh a piece before finishing it.
