In this video I used body movements with breathing techniques to replicate the volume of a mountain that I was tenting next to during a residency. Upon accepting that I would not be able to walk up the mountain I chose to relate to the mountain from the platform of my tent. I set up a video camera and documented myself arranging my body in different positions while under a piece of fabric. The process involved taking a position and holding it for a count of three, then taking another position and repeating the breath count. I selected video stills and created interpolations between them creating a digital scene where my body distorts into different shapes resembling the mountain. A text at the bottom of the video accompanies the movements giving hints to the body positions under the fabric.
This video is one of a two part artwork that explores how alternative understandings of a place emerge through the complex interactions between living beings, technologies, and environments.
During a residency I spent a week tenting facing a mountain. While the mountain was not the focus of the residency, its presence filtered through everything I did. I thought about tectonic forces, geologic time, the other side, living beings who made homes in or on the mountain, beings who came to visit, hunt, give birth or die. I wanted to engage with the mountain by walking into its dense forest and up its steep incline but due to some of my physical restrictions and my anxiety fed by a fear of large wild animals, poisonous fungi, and blood feeding bugs the mountain became physically unclimbable.
I would sit on the platform of my tent and watch the mountain and think of ways to engage with it at a distance. To work within these physical and psychological realities I used my devices for help. I asked my GPS receiver to climb the mountain and invited my 3D scanner and video camera to digitally transform my body into a mountain. The result is a two-part artwork consisting of the sculpture GPS Dreams as Bodymind Becomes Mountain and this video Algorithm for a Bodymountain.
