WEDNESDAY KIM

The Aesthetics of Being Disappeared & Nocturnal Sound

Wednesday Kim is our kind of post-human, an artist unflinching in approach, who translates her inner demons into the most audacious digital animations we’ve had the pleasure to absorb in recent years. Digital angst is on full display through Kim’s short-form animations and motion collages, which have been featured in Supernova programs including: Dark Dreams, Overdrive, the Focal Competition and Silent Screen Invitational, as well as her website, a feline-filled portal providing contemplative connection to the visceral depths of her inner consciousness. Kim’s growing oeuvre and ever-evolving presence provides a fascinating well that warrants continuous return for the more adventurous digital disciples. Her work represents the perfect reflection of technology infiltrating dreams.

Our Extended Bodies

By Livy Onalee Snyder

Wednesday Kim is an artist who prefers to be online. Her motion works are fluent in the vernacular of contemporary digital culture including memes, viral videos, fads, and random products that trace a path through consumer algorithms in a clusterfuck aesthetic. Taking full advantage of the internet's nebulous idea of the digital self, Kim creates cyborgs that are blue like the popular cartoon Smurfs, and non-human avatars like daisies. Her use of cyborgs and avatars extends beyond her artwork. Frequently, Kim adopts digital stand-ins for interviews or studio visits. For those familiar with her practice, this is not all surprising. And for those new to Kim’s practice, this frequent use of avatars is not incredibly difficult to imagine considering the level of intimacy we have with digital technology in our daily lives. Kim’s practice coincides with other artists whose work solely exists in the digital space suggesting a larger movement towards expression of a self that lives online.

Behind the glow of her ten-year-old computer screen, Kim is surrounded by the humming sound of rendering artworks and her fingers typing on the keyboard. Her desk is covered with books and Post-it notes, sometimes filled with doodles, drawn by her daughter. While this space might not immediately appear like an artist’s studio, exploring her desktop, one finds an oeuvre of motion artworks that confound categories that are simultaneously raw and detached, artificial and immediate, sad and humorous. By channeling the absurdity of contemporary information overload, Kim is able to create her own surreal kaleidoscopic prism of reality. 

Most of Kim’s motion artworks, including Aesthetics of Being Disappeared and Nocturnal Sound, exhibited at the Supernova Digital Animation Festival, are driven by life experiences that are expressed in a digital medium. Aesthetics of Being Disappeared was developed as a result of Kim being stuck in Alaska. The work centers on the theme of being consumed by an insatiable internet addiction and a virtual existence. Nocturnal Sound was inspired by her postpartum depression and the mothers who live in Dagenham, UK. The piece allows the viewer to contemplate the experience of debilitating circumstances. As an artist, Kim has found that personal experiences serve as a never-ending resource for her practice but also working through dark nightmares from her past trauma. [1]

While Kim’s practice is driven by her experiences, her work emphasizes the effects on the human psyche and questions the human condition. Usually, Kim’s motion works incorporate 3D elements, but she does not consider herself a 3D artist per se. Rather, she feels her works lean more towards digital collage because her aesthetic combines imagery from multiple sources including phone apps where she often repurposes computer errors or renders that went wrong. This is evident in the mashup of bodies and objects throughout Aesthetics of Being Disappeared and Nocturnal Sound. Bodies combine with heads, heads stack on top of heads and sometimes combine with agriculture or inanimate objects. The backdrop to these Frankenstein-esque figures usually includes a bit of everything depicted with highly saturated hues like lime green or magenta. 

It’s evident that Kim finds comfort in rendering avatars and cyborgs because—in her virtual world—she can take on a voice beyond the biased logistics of her body, gender, and perceived limitations imposed by power dynamics in a prejudiced society. Kim’s work might speak best to someone who has an IRL experience of identity that faces obstacles such as censorship of identity, but online, it is possible to explore an authentic version of the self regardless of the external world. Online, there are endless possibilities for experimenting, evading, and subverting identity. Avatars leave old forms of racial or gender essentialism behind to explore new territory in the world of posthumanism. Kim’s work not only explores the ethics and politics of the construction identity but questions how do we identify something as reality—at what point does the self as an online character—become inseparable from a “real” self? 

Kim’s work also presents a duplexity of virtual space. One perspective might consider the idea of disembodiment as a way of promoting or celebrating liberation from the body. Another perspective might consider the idea of binding the body and mind as a prerogative to the human condition. Ultimately, Kim’s work like Aesthetics of Being Disappeared and Nocturnal Sound present a space to explore these relationships between our physical and extended bodies in a complex world of information and technology that continues to advance at an accelerating rate.

[1] Unpublished interview between the author and the artist May 10, 2022.