Junghyun Kim – Digital Art, AI and New Ecologies

Lesson part of the course Decolonised History of Art: Global Narratives from 1900 to the Present. Click here for the programme and the full course.

This lesson examines contemporary artistic practices at the intersection of digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and ecological thinking, highlighting how artists address the transformations of perception, identity, and environment in the posthuman era. Artists and theorists have paid close attention to extractionism, error and glitch, recursion, and contingency emerging from AI, the Internet, and other advanced technologies, applying these concepts to the sociocultural contexts of gender, race, politics, and ecology. Representative theoretical frameworks include Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI, Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, and Yuk Hui’s theory of Technodiversity, which share a critical awareness of identity and the presumed universality of technological culture. Lu Yang, Ian Cheng, and Refik Anadol’s practices investigate how technological media, virtual environments, avatars, and data-driven aesthetics articulate new modes of identity and existence. Meanwhile, the interest in advanced technologies has also led to an exploration of the ecological systems that both oppose and sustain them. Artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Otobong Nkanga, Anicka Yi, Tabita Rezaire, and Candice Lin employ installation, multimedia, and performative approaches to imagine sustainable futures while questioning extractive economies and human-centered paradigms.

Junghyun Kim is a curator and researcher based between New York and Seoul. A transdisciplinary and eclectic curator, she often works across exhibitions, publications, and collaborative platforms. Her practice explores the evolving relationship between technology, ecology, and contemporary image-making, with a particular focus on digital art.programs.