Krista Kim (Canadian, b. 1976) is a digital artist of Korean heritage based between Toronto and Los Angeles. Working with light, colour and screen-based installation, she creates meditative, zen-inflected environments that she has described as a form of digital consciousness.,
Kim studied Political Science at the University of Toronto and has cited the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, along with the light artists Mark Rothko and James Turrell, as influences on her practice.,In 2014 she wrote the Techism Manifesto, founding the Techism movement, which calls for art and technology to converge for the wellbeing of humanity, a response to the anxiety she associated with smartphone and social media use.,A period living in Japan, and a visit to the Ryōan-ji temple garden in Kyoto, led her to conclude that environment is a mirror of the mind, an idea that has shaped her light-based, screen-projected zen environments ever since.
In March 2020, during COVID-19 lockdown, she built Mars House in Unreal Engine 4 as a virtual-reality dream home combining her light and video art into a single immersive sculpture.,After discovering blockchain that December, she minted it on SuperRare, where it sold for 288 ETH — about $512,000 at the time — in what Unit London describes as the first digital house NFT.,Continuum, a digital reinterpretation of the zen garden she experienced in Kyoto, has since been shown as a large-scale screen work, including a 2022 installation in Times Square.,That year, Continuum: Los Angeles — a 40-minute gradient display inspired by the city's skies — entered the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Her 2022 work Bending Light, shown in Unit London's group exhibition “In Our Code”, is a collaborative generative light painting made with the video artist Ethan Murrow.Her installation HeartSpace uses ECG sensors and AI-driven visualization software to merge participants' individual heartbeats into a single evolving image, framed by the artist as a way of returning ownership of biometric data to the people it belongs to.
