Krista Kim
United States
Where do you locate yourself in relation to the systems you work with?
Where are you heading, and what is pulling you there?
How would you describe the space your practice is currently unfolding in?
Description
As synthetic realities proliferate—deepfakes, AI-generated voices, fabricated identities—the work asks: What remains uniquely, unforgettably human? The answer it offers is the heartbeat: internal, living, impossible to copy or spoof. The work transforms this biological truth into shared aesthetic experience. But it is also about interconnection made visible. Four strangers enter the space. Their individual heart signatures—each as unique as a fingerprint—merge into a single evolving tapestry. The work reveals what we cannot ordinarily perceive: that we are constantly affecting one another, that our emotional states ripple outward, that separateness is a perceptual habit rather than a fundamental truth. At a deeper level, HeartSpace is about reclaiming the body from extraction. The dominant paradigm treats biometric data as raw material for surveillance and profit. HeartSpace inverts this: your heartbeat becomes art, becomes identity, becomes something you witness and keep rather than something harvested without your knowledge. The work demonstrates what data sovereignty feels like—not as policy abstraction but as lived experience.
Process
The urgent threat of AI overtaking our sovereignty. We are at an inflection point. The dominant AI paradigm is isolation, addiction, data accumulation for control and manipulation, corporate productivity. Algorithms harvest our attention, predict our behavior, and steer us toward consumption and compliance. Where is the humanity in that? Where is the connection, the meaning, the soul? I created HeartSpace to demonstrate the alternative—that AI can bring us together rather than isolate us, that it can support human flourishing rather than extract from it. Four strangers enter a room. Their heartbeats merge into a single living tapestry. The technology doesn't harvest—it witnesses, translates, returns. Participants leave having seen something invisible made visible: that we affect one another, that our rhythms can synchronize, that connection is not a relic of the pre-digital world but something technology can actively nurture. The current systems are designed to fragment us—to keep us scrolling alone, comparing ourselves to curated fictions, feeding data to machines that know our vulnerabilities better than we do. HeartSpace is my counter-proposal: biometric AI that serves presence, not surveillance. Collective experience, not algorithmic isolation. Technology in service of what makes us human.
Tools
ECG heartbeat sensors capture each participant's cardiac rhythm in real time. Tenbeo's proprietary AI-generative software translates these signals into unique heart signatures, which are then visualized through TouchDesigner—rendering each heartbeat as distinct waveforms, movement, and color. The colors shift dynamically to reflect emotional states: yellow for calm, greens and blues for moderate emotion, purple for heightened feeling, pink at peak intensity. The visual output displays across full LED screens housed within an infinity mirrored room, creating boundless reflection and spatial immersion. Four participants connect simultaneously, their individual signatures weaving together into a collective tapestry that breathes and evolves in real time.
Since 2010, as founders of Ouchhh, Eylul and Ferdi have created data-driven and AI-based installations shown worldwide. Their work merges scientific research with immersive forms of new-media art.
“Digital human existence is sovereign, creative, and interconnected. The beauty lies in our capacity to shape technology as an expression of our highest consciousness—to use data not to overwrite our identities, but to help us become more fully, more beautifully human.” Krista Kim
In HeartSpace, the heartbeat becomes the elemental conceit expressing this attitude. It is an event that exists only in passing, not a storable, transferable, tradable asset, but an ongoing response of the body to its surroundings. Rendered visible as a curve of light, this pulse becomes an instance of truth, a proof of authenticity and individuality, because it remains inextricably bound to a specific human being.
When its rhythm interlaces with the pulses of others, an image of connectedness emerges that is not based on the exchange of information, but on a shared human finitude.
HeartSpace envisions a digital space in which lives bear witness to one another instead of exploiting one another; a digital space in which visibility serves not optimization, but mutual recognition, awareness, and appreciation, and which at the same time allows us to see that our everyday digital spaces can be shaped beyond the logics of technology corporations and their extractive AI architectures.
