'How do you express what it means to be human in the digital age?'

Krista Kim's "digital paintings" are sublime gradients of colour and light that might make you question what you are looking at exactly, but also wonder some deeper things...like, what is the relationship between technology and art in 2017? 

Kim's work is part of an art movement that she founded in response to our age of digital revolution, and it's called techism. Through techism, Kim is calling on artists to embrace the ways in which technology has disrupted traditional modes of artistic practice and to embrace technology. 

In her techism manifesto, she describes the movement as "an artist's expression drawn from the cross-pollination of contemporary tools: intelligent software and digital media." She creates her large-scale works by digitally manipulating images of LED lights and printing them on a plexi material.

"I basically take the same colour schemes that are used to attract your eye and distract you and I translate that into something that inspires — something that expresses what it means to be human in a digital age," she says.

In this video by Istoica, we meet Kim at her exhibition Digital Consciousness at Only One Gallery during Toronto's Nuit Blanche, where she shares her ideas around the physiology of light, and how colours can affect us.

Watch CBC Arts: Exhibitionists on Friday nights at 12:30am (1am NT) and Sundays at 3:30pm (4pm NT) on CBC Television