Genealogy of Traces_흔적의 계보 (Heunjeok-ui Gyebo)

Genealogy of Traces_흔적의 계보 (Heunjeok-ui Gyebo) is a video work that opens with a staged family portrait of Dokkaebi—mythical beings from Korean folklore—reimagined as a spectral kinship assembled from discarded data. The work introduces a digital mythological genealogy formed not by blood, but by residual memories, fragmented identities, and forgotten data. It functions as both an artwork and a conceptual entry point into the larger Dokkaebi Project, which explores how discarded information gives rise to new presences and alternative forms of existence.

In the work, Dokkaebi are reborn from residual data extracted from Kim’s old 2G slide phone—search histories, text messages, screenshots, and emotional fragments. These spectral figures gather like a family, though some hide beneath the table, hinting at suppressed memories and invisible labor. The Tattooist Dokkaebi emerges from traces of ritualistic searches for healing, while DJ Dokkaebi arises from a secret playlist hidden out of fear of social judgment. These characters form a fractured archive of digital emotion and memory.

The Dokkaebi are constructed through a process that treats digital residue as living material. Kim mines forgotten data from an old 2G slide phone—broken images, corrupted files, search histories, and emotional fragments in memories. This work was born from a handful of memories that refused to disappear and a few photographs that happened to survive. Rather than repairing or concealing errors from difficult periods of Kim’s life, many of which are still unresolved, Kim activates them. Glitches, data leaks, and distortions become deliberate narrative strategies that allow hidden fragments to speak.

Kim’s process moves across multiple digital environments using a constellation of software applications, and open-source platforms that shape the work in unpredictable ways. This technical process is intertwined with Korean oral folklore, particularly the tale of Dokkaebi emerging from objects stained with a woman’s blood. In that story, domestic labor, bodily stigma, and suppressed histories are embedded within discarded things. That mythic logic persists in Kim’s process: each Dokkaebi is generated from what is culturally and digitally abandoned—what refuses to disappear.

Genealogy of Traces begins from what refuses to disappear—memories that leak, data that lingers, and traces that return despite attempts to erase them. The work challenges dominant narratives of purity, origin, and linear identity by proposing an alternative genealogy assembled from residual matter. It asks what it means to exist as a fragment rather than a whole, to inherit not blood but data, emotion, and rupture. In this way, the Dokkaebi become figures of resistance: they emerge not from mythology alone, but from the emotional labor, digital exhaustion, and unrecorded history embedded in discarded technology. Their presence unsettles the desire for clean archives and tidy narratives; instead, they insist on the right of what is broken, impure, or incomplete to exist.