I've followed @poetengineer__'s work for years and keep returning to it because every part of the practice seems connected to a much larger investigation. Most artists develop a medium. Kat appears to have developed a set of questions and refused to let any single medium hold them. She describes her own project as notes on encountering and engineering radically different minds. Whether she is writing, building software, performing, or researching, the work keeps circling the same territory. Intelligence. Emergence. Creativity. Cognition. The possibility that minds are stranger, more distributed, and less bounded than we tend to assume. Part of what makes the practice so compelling is how long she has spent with these ideas. She moves between art, design, writing, and research, but the interests that recur throughout the work never feel borrowed. They have taken shape through years of essays, experiments, performances, and study, the same questions resurfacing from different directions. Poetic Engineering has become one of my favorite ways to engage with the practice because it reveals how deeply those threads run. The ideas don't sit still on the page; they keep turning up in the work, and the work keeps sending me back to them. Across the essays, neuroscience, evolution, collective behavior, artificial intelligence, language, and creativity appear side by side. A spider web becomes a way of thinking about interfaces. A theory of how the brain organizes knowledge becomes a lens for understanding machine intelligence. Subjects that initially seem unrelated gradually reveal themselves to be connected. What I admire most is that technology never feels like the destination. The software, performances, and gestural systems are not demonstrations of technical capability so much as ways of thinking through questions that would be difficult to approach any other way. You see this most clearly in the gestural work. There is no controller and no surface between her and the machine, just her hands moving through open air while particles quicken and scatter with the speed of her fingers, occasionally resolving into sound. It rarely looks like someone operating software. It feels closer to watching someone discover a new instrument while simultaneously inventing it. There are many artists working with computation today. Comparatively few seem interested in computation itself as a phenomenon. Kat approaches it as something worth studying, questioning, and living alongside, returning again and again to emergence, self-organization, and the possibility that the minds we build might help us understand our own. She's been one of the artists I've wanted to collect for years. Few artists have sent me from the artwork to the writing as often as Kat has. An essay sheds light on a performance. A performance changes how I see an artwork. Then the artwork sends me back into the writing again. Being able to finally live with a piece of that feels special.