ABOUT

Seunghwan (Sean) Kim is a practice-based researcher exploring how emerging technologies reshape contemplative experience, embodied attention, and cultural meanings of wellness.

​

His work asks: Can critical making reveal what gets lost — and what becomes possible — when meditation meets computation?

​

Through virtual reality, brain-computer interfaces, and biofeedback systems, Sean creates installations that function as both artifacts and arguments. WAVR, a multi-sensory biofeedback VR meditation system, won the Editor's Choice Award at World Maker Faire. Mindfulness Fountain used site-specific AR to make visible the mental states that shape perception. Rat Race employed procedural rhetoric to expose contradictions in gamified contemplation. Across these projects, making itself becomes a mode of inquiry — surfacing questions that textual analysis alone cannot reveal.

​

This approach reflects a core conviction: the most urgent questions about contemplative technology require researchers who can both analyze platforms and build alternatives.

​

Sean holds an MPS from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where his thesis examined augmented meditation using mixed reality and brain-computer interfaces. As a Dalai Lama Fellow (University of Virginia, 2017), he researched tensions between scientific measurement and experiential knowledge. Currently, he serves as Research Fellow at World Meditation Village in South Korea, conducting ethnographic research on how Buddhist communities navigate the adoption of VR and AI.

​

His creative practice and scholarly inquiry are inseparable — each installation is an experiment, each experiment a form of critical reflection.

​