Laura Hyunjhee Kim - Fueled by the speculative ideology of blobs as both a theory and a practice, Kim illustrates the moldable and transcendent use of “blob” as a lens to understand the spaces lurking between life and art

Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, Accomplices LLC, 2019.
excerpt




A blob is a raw amorphous form
A blob is a potentiality
A blob is an indeterminate destination
A blob is a liminal manifestation of the inexplicable
A blob is neither this nor that but points as is
A blob is a transitional state of being
A blob is a subtle deconstruction of preconceptions
A blob is a real-time negotiation
A blob is a polite refusal of hierarchy
A blob is a poetic irregularity
A blob is a vague matter of existence
A blob is a sensitization to nonlinearity


Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs boldly suggests blobs are the unsung, yet integral link in our language to build upon and describe ideas, culture, and knowledge. The common perspective of the blob is an amorphous form with an otherwise gooey texture, however, this is a gross undermining of the power of language and the vivacity of blobs. Fueled by the speculative ideology of blobs as both a theory and a practice, Kim illustrates the moldable and transcendent use of “blob” as a lens to understand the spaces lurking between life and art. Blobs aren’t solely a physical form. But what is a blob if not just a physical thing?
The simple answer is: everything. Here’s why.


Read this book! It is full of wonders. I love the way it takes theory-izers (Haraway, Hugo Ball, Solnit, Adorno, Jung, Arendt…) and playfully inflects them as blobists—which is to say that Laura Hyunjhee Kim shows how great thinking/writing is quite often a wrestling with the ubiquitous presence of the morphing, ubiquitous shape of a blob. Blob names the signals we regularly receive from the world; they come in not directly but as side-perceptions, out of the corner of our sense organs. We are intimates with these proto-beings, these floaters. The figure of “blob” helps us to dote on them, to capture them long enough to feel them more intensely. A Dadaist once attributed much of the force of the ‘movement’ called dada to the sound of the word Dada. Also very satisfying is to vocalize “Blob”—and to do so in concert with Entering the Blobosphere.– Jane Bennett


Blobservations are observations that involve the total range of social possibility for floral, faunal, mineral and psychic interaction. I’m swooning over Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s intercorporeal, syncretic genius. Here is an emergent philosophical treatise of great magnitude. Here is a provocation inextricably linked to terrestrial experiences in the 21st century while merging all space time conundrums and challenges. Blobs are polysemous thought bubbles that integrate ethics, affects and ecology. An insurgency on legacy thinking, Kim’s cognitive maneuvers signal a paradigm shift of vast magnitude. Consciousness becomes exponentially nuanced and responsive under the tutelage of blobs. Henceforth, engulfed by blobs, sentience will thrive.– Brenda Iijima


A manifesto, a cosmology, a dictionary, and a mapping of the materiality of thought, Entering the Blobosphere reveals that we are already there—living in the untranslatable spaces between meaning and representation, relying on the formless imprecision of blobs as our central modes of apprehension and connection. Drawing on astronomy, biology, critical theory, literature, and philosophy, Kim playfully explores the ooziness at the heart of our epistemological frameworks. Blobology is everywhere, yet impossible to totalize. It is absurd and profound. It brings our molecular relationality into hazy clarity.  Enter the blobosphere and prepare to blob your mind.– Marie Lo


Blobs are not as inert as one might think. In Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s book, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, the reader is taken through a mind-bending and thought-provoking tour of Kim’s observations of their infinite forms. She states the role of the blobologist within the arts is to, “reconfigure and update the artosphere.” Within the blob, there is potential and possibility. Despite what one might think, it is amorphous yet beguiling. If you enable and allow yourself to fall into the boundlessness of the blobosphere, you will soon realize, as Kim has astutely acknowledged, a true blob makes no sense.– Dorothy Santos


As agile navigators of a world inundated with binary logic, the fluidity of a shape-shifting blob is exactly what we need to appreciate that which gets lost in between. Yet under this limitless fluidity and tenderness, Laura Hyunjhee Kim imbues an unmistakable edge, as she writes in the Blobifesto, “A blob is a polite refusal of hierarchy.” The ease with which Kim deftly balances the pleasantly familiar with the cognitively dissonant in a striking reconfiguration of language puts the reader in a state of something akin to a mental workout. Her multitudinous imaginings of the blobosphere, invites us all to become blobologists—the blob, in turn, becoming a Rorschach test for us, lending its form to whatever we find meaningful.– Surabhi Saraf