Living Lab by Laura Hyunjhee Kim
Living Lab
a virtual exhibition by Laura Hyunjhee Kim
November 19, 2020 - February 6, 2021
Artist Talk & Opening Reception: November 20, 2020 at 12pm PST
Zoom Meeting ID: 891 2366 7110 PW: 113844
Artist Workshop: December 2, 2020 at 12pm PST
Closing Reception: February 5, 2021 at 12pm PST
LAURA HYUNJHEE KIM is a multimedia artist who reimagines on/offline (non)human interactions and feelosophical experiences of the body. Thinking through making, she performs moments of incomprehension: when language loses its coherence, necessitates absurd leaps in logic, and reroutes into intuitive and improvisational sense-making forms of expression. Blending and bending pop cultural tropes that playfully engage with the amateur aesthetics of the internet, she utilizes consumer electronics in production and draws inspiration from viral memes, lo-fi pop music, narrative found-footage film, and kitschy low-budget commercials.
Kim’s ongoing practice-based research project, “Living Lab,” focuses on the body as a philosophical medium and contextually shapeshifting laboratory for art-in-the-making. Situating the span of a (non)human life time as a critical framework for attending to the everyday with a sense of wonderment, the spontaneous and improvisational perspective-altering experiments in a “Living Lab” often require the experiential processes of (un)knowing: a destabilization, contestation and subversion of senses that have been made-sense into, normalized, and instituted as facts or forms of knowledge. Responding to the vitality of (non)human companionship and the radicality within these interactions that hold the potential to constitute change, the resulting outcomes of a “Living Lab” pulse (a)rhythmically to an intuitively chaotic score and oscillate with the hybridity and multiverse languages of physiodigital, (im)material, (non)living, and (in)animate worlds.
LAURA HYUNJHEE KIM (b. Palo Alto, CA, USA) is a Korean-American multimedia artist. She has shown work around the world, recently including the Transfer Gallery, Pioneer Works, Telematic Media Arts, Harvestworks, Bienal Internacional de Curitiba, Athens Digital Art Festival, Centro Cultural São Paulo, and The Wrong Biennale. Her projects have also appeared in the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology collection, Westword, ArtSlant, Hyperallergic, KQED, Daily Serving, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Creators Project. She was an artist in residence at the Internet Archive (2017), Korea National University of the Arts (2017) and Electrofringe (with libi rose striegl as the collaborative duo sharing turtle™, 2019). Kim’s music video art SHARING IS CARING received the inaugural ArtSlant Award in New Media (2013) and her short feature video Marvelous Miramol was the first moving image to receive the Wisconsin Union Directorate Art Committee’s Sally Owen Marshall Best in Show Award (2010). In 2019, she received the New Media Caucus Distinguished Scholar Award. In 2020, she was a recipient of the Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award and also the Black Cube Video Art Award for her video Cricket World. Kim is the author of Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, which was published by The Accomplices / Civil Coping Mechanisms (June 17, 2019) and the coauthor of Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object from the Onto-tales of the Digital Afterlife with Mark Amerika, published with Open Humanities Press (November, 2019). She collaborates with numerous multidisciplinary artists and researchers including: Chris Corrente (on sound and music), libi rose striegl (on sharing turtle™), and Surabhi Saraf, M Eifler, Caroline Sinders, Marcus Brittain Fleming, Mariah Hill (on Centre for Emotional Materiality). Kim received a BS in Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and MFA from the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a PhD Candidate in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP) at the University of Colorado Boulder.