From Algorithm to Artifact
Every image you see online has already been shaped before it reaches you. It is filtered, ranked, and delivered through systems that decide what deserves attention. Hyunha Lim’s work starts there, inside that flow of images, and then pulls them out of circulation.
Lim treats digital feed as both subject and material. She collects what platforms and the algorithms show her, then slows it down. She prints it, cuts it, stitches it, and rebuilds it by hand. In doing so, she turns something fleeting into something that holds weight.
Her practice centers on simple tension. Algorithms automate how we see. Her work reintroduces friction.
Lim’s trajectory reflects that tension. She trained as a fine artist in London, working across various mediums before returning to Seoul for her MFA at Seoul National University. There, she built a studio practice and exhibited widely before moving to Atlanta and entering Georgia Tech’s Digital Media program.
That shift was not a departure from art. It was a deepening of the questions behind it.
Her ongoing project Algorithm Diary anchors much of her work. Since 2021, Lim has taken daily screenshots of personalized Instagram ads and recomposed them into collages. The ads appear briefly and disappear quickly, but they carry a logic. They reflect assumptions about who she is, what she wants, and what she might buy.
Lim flips that dynamic. She takes images generated from her own data and reclaims them through composition. Selection becomes authorship. Arrangement becomes critique.
But the work does not stay on the screen.
In projects like Handmade Digital Image and Tied Up, Lim prints these algorithmically generated fragments onto fabric and subjects them to slow, repetitive labor. She braids, stitches, and assembles them into physical forms. In Tied Up, those fragments extend into a long strap that wraps around a gallery space, forcing viewers to confront the accumulation of images that usually pass unnoticed.
The method matters as much as the result. Lim contrasts passive scrolling with deliberate making. The act of stitching becomes a counterpoint to automated consumption.
This emphasis on material translation runs across her work. In Digital Peel, she constructs sculptural forms that resist flat viewing. The viewer must move, shift perspective, and engage physically. The image becomes something you navigate rather than something you consume.
Her painting series, Fake of a Fake of a Fake, pushes the logic further. Advertising already produces constructed realities. Lim layers that construction again through collage, then through painting. Each iteration moves further from the original object while still preserving its persuasive surface.
The question becomes less about truth and more about mediation. How many times can an image be processed before it loses meaning, or does it simply gain new ones?
Other projects expand this inquiry into place. In Personal Utopia, Lim uses Google search results to build landscapes shaped by personalization. The same query produces different environments depending on who searches. The result is not a shared world but a fragmented one, assembled through data.
Across all this work, one theme holds. Digital systems do not just show us the world. They construct it.
Lim’s next project brings that insight into sharper focus.
Re-Materializing Stone Mountain: Stitching the Automated Surface examines how generative AI represents place. Image models pull from vast datasets to produce outputs that appear coherent, but in doing so, they compress complexity. History, politics, and material context flatten into a visually convincing surface.
Stone Mountain serves as the case study. It is a site loaded with historical and cultural meaning, yet AI-generated images often strip that context away. When Lim prompted systems like ChatGPT and Gemini to generate images of the mountain, she found that the outputs mimicked visual patterns without fully engaging with what the site represents.
The result is not incorrect in a technical sense. It is incomplete.
Lim responds the same way she has in earlier work, through material intervention. She takes fragments of AI-generated images, prints them onto silk satin, and reconstructs them through cutting, stitching, and quilting.
The process reintroduces time and decision-making into an automated system. Each stitch marks a choice. Each seam records intervention.
If AI summarizes a place, Lim reinterprets it.
The project does not aim to correct AI. It exposes its limits. It shows how systems trained on aggregated data produce surfaces that feel whole but remain detached from reality.
In that sense, the work extends her broader practice. Where Algorithm Diary captures how platforms shape desire, this project examines how AI shapes the perception of place.
It also raises a more direct question. As tools become more embedded in everyday life, from feeds to generative models to wearable interfaces, how much agency do users give up in exchange for convenience?
Lim’s answer is not abstract. It is physical, and it reintroduces human agency into the process.
She makes the image harder to consume, and in a landscape where images circulate faster than we can process them, Lim’s work insists on something else.
Hyunha Lim’s Re-Materializing Stone Mountain: Stitching the Automated Surface project, which is being supported by the AIAI Network’s seed grant program, is currently still in development.