Hee-Eun Kim (Bekkie) | h.eund
Artist-Researcher | Systems Designer | Participatory Sound
About
Hee-Eun Kim (Bekkie) is a South Korean artist-researcher whose work develops non-extractive, relational systems for making complex environmental and social processes perceptible through sound, movement, and shared interaction. Her practice reframes data not as static representation but as a living, negotiated field that emerges through listening, collaboration, and collective presence.
Drawing on systems theory, environmental science, and Eastern philosophy, Hee-Eun creates frameworks that hold complexity and contradiction rather than reduce them. She integrates local knowledge with empirical data, designing participatory installations that invite audiences to inhabit interdependencies and engage with hidden dynamics. These projects include mapping heavy metal contamination as sonic terrain, reimagining emotion recognition as shared ritual, and transforming vibration data into improvisational jazz.
Hee-Eun's work foregrounds ethical methodologies for community collaboration and interdisciplinary research. Her projects include the development of Behaviour-Driven Systemic Sonification (BDSS), a generative framework modelling environmental systems as evolving sonic fields, and the Relational Cognitive System (RCS), which explores co-regulated, affect-sensitive interaction between humans and AI.
Research
BDSS Prototype Implementation: A Behavioural Approach to Sonifying Photosynthetic Systems (2025)
Works
Grants & Fellowships
- 2024 – DNA Art Lab
Selected Exhibitions & Performances
- 2025 – Void && Form
Interactive installation examining the ethics of affective data through real-time emotion recognition.
Participants' faces are mirrored as digital twins on-screen, set against a large mandala backdrop evoking Buddhist philosophies of impermanence and interdependence. Responsive soundscapes shift with emotional states, rendering private affect as a shared, dynamic environment.
The work invites a contemplative negotiation of selfhood, surveillance, and non-extractive witnessing, transforming observation into an encounter with relational presence.
- 2024 – Metal Rave
Immersive installation translating heavy metal contamination data from the Hyungsan River Basin into navigable sonic cartographies.
Audiences move through projected digital maps while industrial soundscapes expose hidden toxic flows beneath the landscape's surface. By fusing environmental data with visceral sound, the work critiques extractive practices and challenges viewers to confront contamination not as abstract measurement but as lived, material consequence.
- 2024 – Sonification of Soil Contamination Data
Sound piece translating soil contamination data from the Korean Ministry of Environment into immersive sonic environments layered with improvised traditional Korean instruments.
By fusing empirical data with cultural sound forms, the work renders the heaviness of environmental pollution as an embodied, shared listening experience. It invites audiences to confront toxicity not as distant abstraction but as a felt, cultural memory, bridging scientific measurement with interpretive storytelling to surface hidden ecological burdens.
- 2024 – Deviated Vibrations
Generative sound work transforming anomaly detection data from the accelerator into an improvised jazz composition.
By mathematically modelling the erratic patterns of beamline vibrations as jazz riffs, the piece reimagines scientific irregularities as creative departures rather than errors. This interpretive translation invites listeners to hear complexity and unpredictability not as noise to be corrected but as the basis for new forms of meaning, bridging technical measurement with musical improvisation.
- 2024 – !Mediengruppe Bitnik 4X4, Seoul Edition
Performed as The Shot within !Mediengruppe Bitnik's 4X4, a programme pairing artists meeting for the first time to co-create new work over four days.
The performance examined sound's infiltration of everyday space through layered assemblages of objects, images, and audio, activating these elements to transform material meaning and reveal subtle narrative structures embedded within familiar environments.
Experiments
Data Model Sonification Series
A comparative sound experiment exploring how different cognitive and informational models can convey emotional ambiguity and complexity. This series includes:
- Neural Net Approximation
- CLARION Dual-Process Model
- Temporal Pattern Recognition
- Information Theory Model
Relational Cognitive System (RCS)
A novel framework for designing cognitive systems that prioritise relational emergence over computational optimisation. RCS reconceptualises cognition not as input–output processing within isolated agents but as a distributed, negotiated process arising in dynamic relational fields.
Drawing on systems theory, dynamic systems theory, and Eastern philosophy, RCS models cognition as emergent from recursive symbolic interaction, affective entrainment, and coherence-seeking negotiation. Rather than treating meaning as a static output, it emphasises symbolic anchoring, emotional field modulation, and improvisational adaptation as essential mechanisms of cognitive stability.
RCS architectures employ multi-agent systems, recursive feedback, and resonance-based evaluation to model cognition as evolving negotiation among distributed inputs, memory traces, and environmental conditions. This approach enables systems capable of co-creating meaning with human participants, supporting affect-sensitive, ethical, and participatory interaction design.
Implemented in projects such as Behaviour-Driven Systemic Sonification (BDSS), RCS demonstrates its principles through real-time modelling of plant adaptation, distributed emotional intelligence systems, and experimental human–AI interfaces. It offers practical methodologies for affective computing, symbolic reasoning, and collaborative interaction design that seek to think with rather than for human participants.
Echo Chamber
An ongoing experimental interface applying the principles of the Relational Cognitive System (RCS) to affective computing. Rather than offering answers or interpretation, Echo Chamber creates space for complexity by engaging the participant's voice through four artificial emotional agents, each mapped to neurological functions: Amygdala (fear and urgency), Insula (embodied intuition), Prefrontal Cortex (regulation), and Hypothalamus (primal complexity).
When a participant speaks, these agents respond not by analysing sentiment or providing solutions, but by witnessing what is said, what is left unsaid, and the spaces in between. This interaction generates an emergent emotional field rather than a fixed output, modelling behaviour that arises through ongoing negotiation and adaptation rather than programmed responses.
Echo Chamber demonstrates RCS philosophies in practice: sound as evidence of relational negotiation, systems designed for co-regulated, affect-sensitive interaction, and behaviours that emerge unpredictably from dynamic interdependencies. Each encounter is ephemeral, storing nothing, dissolving once complete. By rejecting archival extraction, the system challenges conventional AI tendencies and reframes presence as a shared, transient constellation of meaning.
Behaviour-Driven Systemic Sonification (BDSS)
A novel sonification methodology that moves beyond reductive input–output mapping to model the adaptive negotiation inherent in complex systems. Rather than translating discrete data points into fixed sonic parameters, BDSS approaches sound as the emergent expression of systemic behaviour unfolding in real time.
BDSS conceptualises environmental or physiological processes as trajectories within dynamic attractor spaces, where states are characterised by overlapping, fuzzy boundaries instead of binary classifications. Agent-based negotiation layers simulate the balancing of competing pressures, producing sonic textures that embody tension, adaptation, and feedback.
Within this framework, sound becomes evidence of a system's capacity to negotiate internal and external forces, revealing the subtle logics through which stability, change, and coherence are continuously redefined. By reframing sonification as an articulation of relational negotiation rather than static representation, BDSS enables the perceptual exploration of hidden dynamics in a form that invites interpretation, critical listening, and ethical engagement with complexity.
Photosynthesis as Generative Sound: Hearing Plant Conversations
An applied BDSS experiment modelling the adaptive negotiation dynamics of a C3 plant across a compressed diurnal cycle. The system represents the plant's physiological state as a continuously shifting point within a three-dimensional vector space defined by light intensity (PAR), temperature, and water potential. This space is structured with overlapping attractor zones—rest, recovery, stress, and critical—whose fuzzy boundaries capture transitional states rather than enforcing binary classifications.
Negotiation within this model is enacted through three virtual agents with distinct roles. Agent A modulates core frequency, managing systemic balance and tension. Agent B adjusts harmonic intervals in real time based on a coherence metric, responding to changes in system stability. Agent C functions as a memory layer, recalling or repeating motifs when significant state changes occur.
These agent interactions are rendered as granular synthesis textures, with harmonic guidance rules shifting in real time to reflect varying levels of systemic coherence. Real-time sensor or MIDI inputs allow external modulation of environmental parameters, inducing stress or testing recovery. Visualisations in TouchDesigner map attractor space coordinates and coherence metrics to generative particle fields, making the negotiation process intuitively perceivable.
This experiment treats sound not as a direct translation of data but as the emergent signal of an ongoing negotiation between environmental pressures and internal adaptive responses, offering new ways to perceive and understand systemic behaviour.
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Inspired by the World Wide Web's first page, 1991.