 Good morning. My name is Joseph Fowler, and I'm the head of Arts and Culture here at the World Economic Forum. A very warm welcome to you all that are joining us here in the Fusion Room in Davos, and a very good morning to those of you joining us online. Before we start this morning's session, I'd like to take a moment just to be sure our phones are switched to silence in order not to disrupt the session once we begin. This morning's session is called Mindfulness in Continuum, and it's my pleasure to introduce to you Krista Kim, contemporary artist and pioneer, Krista Kim. Thank you so much, Joseph, and thank you all for joining me this morning for this guided meditation. Before we begin, I'd like to talk a little bit about continuum. Continuum is a digital landscape, a Zen landscape. And what really influenced me was creating an immersive experience of Zen that is digital. I like to use large screens because I believe that having an immersive experience coupled with healing sound frequencies can really change your brain state. It was in Roengi Tempogarden in Kyoto where I experienced an incredible immersive experience, the first which led me to this journey of creating the same tranquil and serene experience in the digital. So continuum is actually creating gradients. And gradients are the minimalism of the screen, stripping away the noise. I wanted to basically create an experience that is digital that is in response to the disruption and the relentless distraction that we are subjected to in our modern day because of our over-reliance on digital devices. So today, I'd like to create and share with you a guided meditation that is in the digital language, and so we shall begin. Can everyone please close your eyes and sit comfortably in your chairs and take deep breaths. Bring your awareness to the present moment, to your body seated here, feeling into the points of contact with the floor and any tension in your muscles. Release as you breathe slowly. Exhale and release any tension starting from the top of your head. Every part of your body, scanning now. Release. When you feel ready, gently open your eyes and gaze softly into the gradients on the screen. Allow your vision to relax and come into focus. The colors will begin shifting slowly, the transition subtle. Follow the movements with a gentle gaze, keeping your breath slow and steady. Breathe in. Allow any thoughts that arise to drift by like passing clouds. You will return your awareness to your breath and the evolving colors before you. Sense the colors gradually guiding you into a tranquil hypnotic state. Feel the busyness of your mind quiet with each passing moment. As you sink deeper into stillness, notice the interconnectedness between your breath, body and continuum. See how they move and change together, connected as one system. Appreciate each passing moment with each passing gradient. A visual mantra reminding you to be fully present now. Feel this light gently entering your body, streaming through your face, down your shoulders and arms, into your heart center. Feel it filling you up from head to toe with tranquility and vision any heaviness or darkness within you dissolving, cleansed by the saturation of this colorful light. With conscious press, continue visualizing you and the artwork, exchanging color. Each inhale draws color further in, each exhale radiates more outward. As you breathe consciously for the next few minutes, fully arrive into this present moment. Appreciate the subtle beauty shifting before you. This is all there is. Envision glowing beams emanating from your heart space, connecting you to the artwork As one peaceful system, bask here. Take some slow deep breaths. As we conclude our tranquil experience, I will leave the last minutes for mindful silence. I hope everyone is nice and relaxed. Enjoy the session today. I enjoyed it very much. I want to thank everyone for coming and joining this wonderful guided meditation. I'm actually the first I've ever given, so it's such a beautiful experience to share with you. My vision is for continuum as a public art installation, a mindfulness of connection, human connection, using technology. I wanted to tour around the world in Times Square in 2002 for the month of February. I created a great incredible project that I, it's like a dream come true. In the most hectic place on earth, we're able to create a meditative installation. And it had such a positive response. And so I would like to bring this around the world. Cities, towns, so that we can be reminded that digital technology can be for good. That we can elevate our consciousness. That we can be better, smarter and wiser with emerging technologies. Especially during this period, pivotal period with the emergence of AI metaverse blockchain. And now I welcome any questions about my practice or about the session and we can have a conversation. If anyone has any comments or questions, you're more than welcome. Okay, then I have a question for you. How was the experience? Did you have any sensations and feelings from the beginning of this experience to the end? Does anyone have any answers to that question? I would like to answer. Yes. Thank you. It's kind of a combination of both. I thought that the meditative experience was a little quicker than when I just closed my eyes and meditated. So thank you very much for this. And I'm wondering how this is. What is the effect that these colors have on me? And how did you choose the colors? Or does any color do? So yes, thank you for the question. All of us have a physiological response to color. And I believe because we basically have evolved over thousands of years looking at the sky and the sunset. And I believe there is a direct reference to the light in nature. And I wanted to basically bring that into the digital because we can't convince people who are digital natives not to basically look at the screen as an experience of Zen without introducing a physiological response. I want people to look at it and not think but feel like a Rothko. And so the colors are intentional. What I do is I actually create digital paintings. I do paintings of light and I collate them. It's a series of paintings that are animated with my collaborator Efren Moor. And the music is composed by Lugovskoy. So it's a team effort. And we've been creating these projects since 2018. And it's come a long way since then. Can you talk a little bit about the sound here? You said earlier that it's tuned to a specific frequency. So I'm just curious to what frequency and what the sound has in relation to the colors that we see in the meditative state. So the actual frequency is the heart frequency. I forget the number. I have dyslexia of numbers so I forget. But I know it's the heart frequency if you look it up. And it's very intentional. There are many frequencies and now there are studies that show that sound is healing to the body and can actually alter your brain states. And so I like to use technology for people who don't meditate. 80% of the world doesn't. And so this is a tool for people to have sort of a beginner's guide if you will into altered states that can lead them down a path perhaps to meditation and developing a practice. I meditate every day. And I believe that creating meditative experiences like the Zen garden in Kyoto is a service to humanity. And I believe that translating that into the digital language is something that we need to introduce. We need to introduce Zen, mindfulness, a practice into the 21st century for new generations to understand and adapt quickly. Thank you. Thank you, Krista. Zen is also about sound. In spaces like Times Square, and I'm from London, so I'm thinking about Piccadilly Circus one day, where we're not able to bring the sound element to your installation, to your Zen park. How do you not compromise that full spectrum of experience where you can only bring the visual and not the sound? The context of an urban center and taking over the advertisement screens that are normally used for commercial messaging, and it becomes a cacophony, it's very distracting when you're at Times Square. Many New Yorkers don't like to go there because it's like a headache, right? It's too much stimuli. When you take over a place like this and what I've observed from the Times Square experience that you don't need sound it's a little bit difficult production-wise to achieve that with sound. Way more permits and things you have to arrange. But just the fact that you're able to create a moment of Zen, just strip away all the ads, the commercialism, and focus on humanity, collective humanity. That was the takeaway that people understood. Like this is for us, it's not meant to try to sell us something, but it's meant to make us feel good. And that had such a huge impact, especially for the Gen Z. It went viral on TikTok and people were touched by that, you know, by the artwork because of that message. Thank you. See you in Piccadilly Circus, hopefully. Oh yeah, I would love to do Piccadilly. Yes. Hi, Krista. Thank you for that. This is a lovely start to the day. I come from India and we have a lot of meditation, yoga and what not. And what I've always been taught and what when I've done guided meditations, it's always with the eyes shut. So I was looking around because they say visuals are distracting. And for us, we look within and focus on the breath and feel the breath and that's how we meditate. Having said that, so this was a different experience for me. I found it a little challenging looking at the visuals. So I basically did 10 minutes with eyes shut and then 10 minutes looking at the visuals. The thing that I found was I really enjoyed seeing the colors. And as you said, it's a physiological response. And these are happy colors that you've put in there. So I just felt very happy. That was the feeling I had. And when I did it with my eyes shut, that's when I felt just going within, centering myself and feeling the mindfulness. So I'd like to thank you for the experience, something different that I learned today. And I hope you will get this to India also. I'm from Mumbai and I hope you will get this to India also someday. Thank you so much for that. Thank you. I completely agree with you. I believe that as a meditator, going in, there's nothing more blissful and beautiful than that experience of meditation. I practice transcendental meditation every day. But yes, creating the visual is something like a tool, a guide for people who possibly are not ready to go there. You know what I mean? Not everyone's ready to meditate and go on that next step. But this could be sort of a cultural invitation, if you will, to exploring an inner journey. Thank you. Well, yeah. Maybe, I mean, I have to ask because I'm a bit surprised I expected the room to be much fuller than that. Is it that you like challenges because, I mean, Times Square, as that was also, I mean, I don't know, you cannot fight for attention and the people there because everybody needs running. And is it that you like challenge or do you... How much room do you think there is in Davos for this kind of event actually? You know, I'm used to doing things that are niche. You know, I'm not... I'm a very different kind of bird. So I know that my message is very, you know, sort of like avant-garde and I'm used to that. And I'm happy to share my message with people who are willing to accept it because I know that within 10 years, the culture will come around. I'm a little bit... We're ahead of our time here. And Times Square was really interesting, you know, because the first week was very quiet. It was post-COVID. It was the first... It's organized by Times Square Arts. They're a wonderful curation group that curates the Times Square screens. The first week was quite quiet, but then there was one TikTok post of the experience and all of a sudden people started screaming, a streaming into Times Square to see the exhibition at midnight in February, the coldest month of the year in New York, like the most difficult time. But people showed up. And I think people are really wanting connection because we're in the midst of a loneliness and mental health epidemic and especially post-COVID. People were really yearning and that's the human condition. So if we can create these safe spaces of mindfulness where people are allowed to be vulnerable, that's a very rare occurrence, but it should be normalized. And I think that can help our society deal with the loneliness crisis. Well, thank you so much for joining. It was such a beautiful experience here at Davos. So happy to share this moment with you. Thank you.