Andrea Shinyoung Kim is a documentary media artist and interdisciplinary scholar from Orange County, CA working between LA and Seoul, South Korea. She is the director of The (In)visble Organ, a 50-min documentary about destigmatizing the inner reproductive anatomy through biomedical innovation. With a long standing interest of bridging art, science, and technology, Andrea explores how virtual worlds can be designed in ways that center cultural memory and queer embodiment. Formerly, as a research assistant at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Andrea explored transmedia documentary forms and co-creative methods. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD at USC in Media Arts and Practice.
“My project brings three proto-mythological figures of cyberspace in dialogue - a bear god, reincarnated idol, and medieval shaman postulate the origins of their world and their place within it. This work is an auto-theoretical exploration of how cultural and social identities are transposed to virtual realms, defining the Self beyond Asian, Korean American, or Woman as static constructs, and rather as distributed in dynamic, non-linear, and fragmented ways. By designing a collection of avatars, I consider “multi-persona” as a new mode for engaging with XR and online space more broadly.”