Jihyo Eom appropriates and twists the interfaces that smoothly steer us in a single direction, turning them into rough, resistant ones. She does so by reassembling the familiar grammars of contemporary media (the internet, social media, apps, and games) through game engines and physical structures. Also working as a commercial director, she often draws on the contradictions and tensions of being both a producer and a consumer of media content. She embraced digital media as a profession out of love for its expressive and expansive potential, yet she has also deeply experienced the lethargy and isolation brought on by its immersiveness and addictiveness. Recognizing this as a social condition rather than a private one, she approaches her work with empathy and a sense of responsibility.

This affection for media, and fatigue with it, lead to work that explores and reimagines the space between the two. Her game and installation somewhere4u.net (2023) deals with objects of nostalgia that now exist only as big data, experimenting through gameplay with ways of returning memory to the individual. A Warp to Remember (2024) questions the outsourcing of memory while exploring whether the hazy times and spaces of recollection can be reconstructed with AI. Beginning with Bardo (2025), she has turned a critical eye on a media ecosystem that moves beyond dependence into immersion and addiction, bringing materiality and the body more actively into her work. Likening states of immersion and addiction to the trance and ecstasy of spirit possession, she investigates where media, understood as a medium in the shamanic sense, might take us.