Kimchi and Chips

Kimchi and Chips studio (founded in 2009 by Mimi Son and Elliot Woods) begin their practice at the recognition that the arts, sciences and philosophy are not distant disciplines which must be bridged, but act as alternative maps onto the same territory, and that employing these maps in tandem allows the territory to be navigated more readily.

Their installation series "Drawing in the Air" was a study of mass and space-time. It brought together the relativistic mechanics of Einstein, the duration oriented philosophy of Buddhism and the divide between reality and images which has escalated to a dilemma within contemporary western politics. This series culminated in the public artwork Halo at Somerset House which brought the sun down to earth in a heady alchemy of technology and nature. 99 robotic mirrors reflected sunlight into a cloud of water during the height of summer to create drawings out of sunlight under the chaotic control of the weather and Copernican dynamics. Their research based approach has caused them to give the "first word" on a number of artistic formats both conceptually and in execution - specifically within the fields of volumetric images in fog and 3D projection onto non-designed forms. Consequently, they became the first Korean artists to win the Award of Distinction at Ars Electronica signifying their importance within the field of media art. By releasing their techniques online as over 100 open source code libraries, countless other practitioners have adopted the studio’s understanding and incorporated it into their own work.

Mimi Son, born in Seoul where currently she lives and works. She co-founded Kimchi and Chips with Elliot Woods in 2009. An obsession with geometry and Buddhist philosophy inspires her to articulate space and time from various perspectives. This continuous experiment has allowed her to create installation that aims to depict an intersection of art and technology, material and immaterial, real and virtual, presence and absence. Over the past decade she has worked as a designer, professor, storyteller, curator, and artistic director in various countries and institutions. She completed her master degree on Digital Media Art and Design at Middlesex University and Interaction Design at Copenhagen Institution of Interaction Design (CIID).

Elliot Woods, a digital media artist from Manchester UK where he graduated with a Masters from the School of Physics and Astronomy. He entered the arts following the founding of studio Kimchi and Chips in 2009 where he currently tests alternative relationships between images and reality. Here he participates in conceptual and technical design of projects, and develops techniques in computer vision, machine learning and robotics. His works reveal the implicit nature of systems therein suggesting to audiences revelatory experiences about nature and reality. He has created large scale light field art installations which draw floating images of the sun out of sunlight, or moons from 600 calibrated projector beams. Elliot has contributed to the openFrameworks and VVVV creative coding platforms and has released over 100 open source libraries for free on GitHub.