The World as Ragged Patchwork and the Body as Glitch: An Analysis of Heecheon Kim’s Deep in the Forking Tanks and Ghost(1990)

The digital extensions of our bodies and virtual worlds have been more than mere supplements to our physical existence. Rather than maintaining a dominant position as the agents that deploy them, our physical bodies have begun to be registered as glitches, as the residue and dregs of the simulated world.

In Heecheon Kim’s work, our contemporary world comprises layers of simulations such as face filters, GPS coordinates, and game avatars, and human bodies can only reveal themselves as unwanted interlopers that provoke contingencies and disrupt the predestined temporality of simulations. Despite the earlier theoretical celebrations of the glitches as disenchanters of high-tech trends, the body-glitch in Kim’s work does not function as a window-breaker of a simulation or a debunker of a myth of the transparency of simulation. For Kim, contemporary simulations are not shattered by glitches, but rather devour them, digest them, and make them a part of themselves. Through Kim’s work, I present the contemporary world as one opaque and jumbled, altogether different from the traditional myth of “transparent” and “seamless”, and rather define it as a “ragged patchwork” of clips excerpted from the real and the virtual without distinction. Through the bodies on the edge of simulation within Kim’s Deep in the Forking Tanks (2019) and Ghost(1990) (2021), this essay examines how physical bodies register themselves as glitches, only to be incorporated into the patchily simulated world. In doing so, I demonstrate how this world of image-rags relocates and reconditions the contemporary human body more generally.