We
Kinmakers is a reflection of the collaborative, relational ethos that has shaped this strand of my practice. It is the latest evolution of the Centre for Emotional Materiality (CEM), which I began in 2018 to explore how digital technologies shape our bodies, emotions, beliefs, and relationships with the more-than-human world. Over time, this inquiry has expanded into a constellation of collaborations and rituals—foregrounding listening, movement, and kinship across boundaries of self and species.
While CEM’s early years included a larger, rotating cast of contributors, Kinmakers now emerges through an ongoing partnership between myself and Laura Hyunjhee Kim.
At its heart, Kinmakers is a space for spiritual and world-building rituals rooted in Quantum Listening—a term borrowed from Pauline Oliveros to describe attunement to multiple realities at once. As Sophie Strand writes, “relationships are sentient.” I hold this close. These works are not just made with others—they are made of our relationships.
These collaborative projects live under the banner of We
Kinmaking is an exploration of spiritual and world-building rituals, rooted in Quantum Listening. Kinmakers cultivate radical belonging, dissolving boundaries between self, others, and the more-than-human world.
Kinmaking
A kinmaker’s ritual always begins with humming—a primal practice of grounding and resonance, opening a connection to the hidden frequencies of the self and the Earth.
Humming
Quantum Listening is a practice composer Pauline Oliveros described as “listening to more than one reality simultaneously,” attuning to layered dimensions of sound, presence, and meaning.
Quantum Listening
Hidden Songs In Our Mother’s Dreams
Crow Museum of Asian Art, 2024
The opening chapter of Kinmakers, Hidden Songs in Our Mother's Dreams, unfolds through kinmaking and quantum listening—an exploration of the unspoken yet deeply felt dreams of our mothers' mothers and beyond. This immersive installation includes a three-channel video called The Hum, a video sculpture titled Song of Kin, and two participatory performances called Rituals of Kinmagic.
Becoming Kinmakers
Movement Lab, Barnard College, 2024
Becoming Kinmakers is a live, multimedia performance where notions of time, space, and self melt and re-form, shaped by the porous language of a shapeshifting blob. It is an improvised felt-rhythm between two performers—part spell, part transmission—that evokes an emergent, fluid kinship.
Developed for the Artificial environments / environmental Intelligence Festival (Ae/eI) at Columbia University’s Movement Lab, this work-in-progress performance explores the interstices of nature and technology, embodiment and abstraction.
Beyond all Polarities, We Are, ____.
SFMOMA,2022
Presented at SFMOMA in response to Speculative Portraits, this immersive performance invited participants into a somatic, sonic, and sculptural exploration of identity in uncertain times. Through ambient sound, projected text, and a collaborative clay ritual, we asked: Who are we beyond our preferences, fears, and digital selves?
Visitors were guided to slow down, feel-through-sense, and melt into a blobby sense of interbeing—where emotion became material and boundaries gave way to shared presence.
Interblobbing Towards the Love of Missing Out
Connecticut College, 2022
Inter-blobbing Towards the Love of Missing Out was a participatory performance, an embodied antidote for when an obscured sense of fear starts crawling inside, crowding our sense of self-worth with messy feelings, clouding our pathway towards love. Organized by Surabhi Saraf and Laura Hyunjhee Kim as part of their residency with the CEM at Connecticut College for 2022 Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology this performance was part of CEM’s three part keynote commission and residency.
Embodied Emotional Resilience Blobichi
Pioneer Works, 2020
Embodied Emotional Resilience is a movement-based workshop that explores how emotions are felt, distorted, and reclaimed in a world of digital surveillance. Using the blob as a somatic and conceptual guide, participants engage in Blobichi—a Tai Chi–inspired meditation that expands emotional expression beyond screen-based habits.
Centre for Emotional Materiality
Southern Exposure, 2018
Centre for Emotional Materiality (CEM) is a collaborative research project founded in 2018 to explore how intelligent technologies shape our emotional, bodily, and spiritual lives. Launched at Southern Exposure, CEM brought artists, technologists, and thinkers together through residencies, readings, and public rituals to imagine new ways of relating to machines, each other, and the Earth.
