Exhibition Curation, Research, Performance Programming, Event and Media Production
Embodied Frequencies was a two-day exhibition and performance program positioning sensory experience as a mediator for how humans process presence and intimacy in technologically mediated environments. Through research driven curation and interactive works, the showcase reframed “sensuality” not as eroticism, but as heightened sensory awareness, exploring how embodied experience can deepen intimacy and open pathways for connectivity through multidisciplinary contributions.
Artists and researchers whose practices span sound installation, video game, animation, and sculptures were invited to realize this concept into a creative and epistemological inquiry. Drawing from frameworks within embodied cognition theories, the works illustrate how sensory inputs can traverse from raw perception to collective cultural memory through embodied, structured, and socially mediated cognition.
Community sound archives, object recordings, and biofeedback systems were presented as epistemic artifacts, offering new ways to sense community histories and emotional truths. Kive Studio led exhibition curation, research, experiential design, and performance programming, producing an environment where research and practice merge to create immersive forms of connection.
Curated by Hyoeun Kang and Isabel Murphy
Featured Artists
Jenna Caravello
KronoDonum is an installation and two-player video game that explores virtual care, asymmetrical intimacy, and the temporal disjunctions of online relationships. Played across two adjacent screens representing the present and the past respectively, participants use custom controllers to enter five-letter words that manifest as object-gifts in the other’s timeline. These ephemeral items remain only as long as the other player is active, and when both players place corresponding objects in the same spatial coordinates, they become permanent—otherwise, they disappear.
The project takes inspiration from the collaborative dynamics of networked open-world gaming but reframes these mechanics through the lens of emotional labor and memory. Typing, waiting, and object placement become acts of reciprocal care and subversive play. Caravello references Mark Fisher’s concept of hauntology, in which the present is shaped by unrealized futures. In KronoDonum, players operate within an architectural split (what one screen can see, the other cannot), creating a system in which each player’s world is haunted by the relational debris of the other.
Situated within the context of a digital friendship shaped by pandemic-era isolation, the work explores how connection is shaped, stored, and lost within networked game spaces. It recalls a liminal Los Angeles in 2020, stagnant domestic interiors, and the ambient estrangement of care delivered through screens. By rendering affect as gameplay and absence as mechanic, KronoDonum positions online intimacy as a fragile and cooperative system, one shaped as much by the gaps between players as by their interactions.
Evesaltocave (Yidan Eve) works across mixed-media installations, live performance, video documentation, and poetry as channels to express emotion, thought, and embodied feeling. At the core of her practice is an exploration of the connection between humans, other living beings, and the essence of life itself — interwoven with reflections on time and memory, spirit and belief, the maternal body, and love. Deeply influenced by the era she lives in and the impressions of her early life, her work examines technology, human motivation, perception, and the tension between future energy and primordial force. These investigations unfold through a visual language that leans into the unreal, the fantastical, and the poetic, merging sensorial realities with imagined realms.
In collaboration with multidisciplinary artist C+, Eve performed a slow, durational movement piece responding to light and sound across C+’s installation. Beginning with restrained gestures, she gradually crossed the space toward a hollow doorway, unveiling a piece of wrapped fabric around her body in a gesture of vulnerability, and transformation. She then ascended onto her sculptural work Honest Touch, where she remained motionless in a state of rest and serenity even after the performance ended. This stillness left the audience to navigate her presence as both figure and form within the exhibition environment.
Olive Kimoto
Olive Kimoto is a multidisciplinary artist building portals through sound, installation, and performance to explore the body, ecology, and the sacred in a post-digital world. Bridging the ancient and the futuristic, the intimate and the collective, her work creates immersive environments where ecological grief, ancestral memory, and evolving technologies weave new mythologies.
Kimoto presented Resonance in the Non-Age II, a speculative ritual in which plastic stone speakers emit recordings of lost landscapes, extinct animals, and synthetic voices—traces of a natural world displaced by human and machine noise. Alongside this static work, she performed Mirror 花, Water 月, staging an encounter between body and the intangible, where touch, water, and light circulated as frequency and form. Contact between skin and water triggered synths, while voice and samples folded into the circuit, surfacing embodied memory as sensation: held only briefly by water, at once conduit, threshold, and mirror.
In S3r3nity_sp3llcast3rx2001 (2024), Sam creates a portal into speculative worlds where tenderness, care, and collective imagination serve as tools of resistance against capitalism and patriarchy. Drawing from Ursula K. LeGuin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which reframes history away from weapons and toward vessels of gathering and sustenance, Sam proposes a narrative beyond violence, one rooted instead in intimacy, community, and the everyday technologies of survival.
The installation combines tactile sculptural elements, text fragments, and a video game style cutscene where a spellcasting character speaks in a hybrid language woven from Sam’s writing and ChatGPT’s translation into archetypal fantasy RPG dialogue. Referencing the mechanics of classic Pokémon games, the dialogue box becomes a site where theory and play merge, offering an alternative lore in which a guild of spellcasters recounts how collective imagination toppled oppressive systems.
The surrounding sculptural forms, stitched surfaces carrying bone like ceramic fragments, extend this world building into the physical gallery. They evoke both the vulnerability of the body and the resilience of communal structures, echoing the tension between fragility and care. By situating her work at the intersection of technology, nature, and embodied memory, Sam invites viewers into a space of ambient storytelling that does not rely on grand weapon centered arcs but on quieter practices of hope, interdependence, and survival.
Chris Giang (exteeng) is a multimedia sensory artist and data scientist based in Oakland, CA. Her practice interlaces tea, flowers, incense, and handmade ceramics with soundscape and tactile forms, exploring the tenderness embedded in everyday experience. Through experimentation and deconstruction, she blends auditory, visual, and haptic elements to create immersive environments that invite presence and reflection. Expanding her work through spatial design and interdisciplinary collaboration, she continues to reshape how sensory language is perceived and understood.
Her installation Haptic Garden invited guests into a multisensory, biofeedback-driven environment of moss islands, floral arrangements, and bioplastic objects embedded with fragments of flora. Each object responded to touch, triggering shifting tones that layered into an interactive soundscape. In this way, interaction became composition. Audiences collectively authored the piece through their engagement, transforming the installation into a responsive ecosystem where intimacy with touch / sound generated embodied presence.
