darcy kim is
a spider dreaming they are a cyborg. as a watson fellow, my project took me to communities across Johannesburg, Manila, Seoul, São Paulo, Tokyo, Aruba, Berlin, and beyond, archiving how people live with, resist, and reimagine technology in places most impacted by its harms. my practice begins from the conviction that creators are not separate from their creations. technologies carry the ethical, spiritual, and political imprints of those who design them. under dominant colonial and capitalist paradigms, artificial intelligence often amplifies extraction, surveillance, and violence particularly against marginalized bodies. I work instead to cultivate AI as a tool for liberation: community-centered, locally grounded, and accountable to the ecosystems and lives it touches.
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I don’t look (south) korean
i don’t look (south) korean. after breezing through customs with only a couple bows and not a single word exchanged, i get my train ticket and takeoff to seoul. there are five people on the train with me, and every one of them has porcelain…
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stuck in atl | leaving home part 2
the first thing i did when i realized all hotel rooms in atlanta were booked out was find a plug. i looked up from an endless screen of sold out motels to a yellow vested guy sat scrolling through his phone. ‘are you from atlanta?’…
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crowdstrike failure leaves me down atrocious | leaving home part 1
i wake up at 430am to catch my flight out of Baltimore. The clouds are still shadows in the sky. I hug mommy goodbye at the terminal and watch her drive away through the sliding glass doors. All the delta counters were down when i…
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Baccalaureate Speech
I gave this speech for my Baccalaureate Graduation ceremony at Wellesley College. When I first came to Wellesley 4 years ago, I felt callouses forming at the corners of my heart. The parts that rubbed up against the anger and pain and violence that breathes…
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Watson Application
My personal statement for the Watson Fellowship Application. As with all applications, my voice and style and messaging are keenly aware of its audience… I grew up in a community of Korean and Hispanic immigrants. Store signs and conversations were rarely in English. Still, I…
