GPS Dreams as Bodymind Becomes Mountain

This artwork explores how alternative understandings of a place emerge through the complex interactions between living beings, technologies, and environments.

During a 2024 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, and 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.

Instead, 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 I 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 a video Algorithm for a Bodymountain.

When Spider Spins Dusk, Curated by Junghyun Kim. Coreana Museum of Art. Seoul, Korea.

I powered up the GPS receiver, waited for it to connect to the satellites and then laid it by my bed and fell asleep. While I slept it logged longitude, latitude, and altitude until the battery died. The next day, I exported and cleaned the data and then used 3D modeling software to generate a curved line through the point cloud of satellite coordinate data. This line gives a speculative path up the mountain taken by the GPS receiver. In the gallery, the path up the mountain was recreated as a group of wooden tables gradually rising in height leading to the Bodymountain video. A golden coloured line on tabletops reinforces the path, and placed on the tables are twenty 3D prints made from 3D scans from my daytime movements.

During the day, to ease my psychological stresses I tried to relate to the volume of the mountain through somatic movement techniques. I set up a 3D scanner, draped myself in fabric, and matched my body positions to the shape of the mountain. The scanner then took surface measurements of the draped fabric creating 3D geometric models. These models were 3D printed at a low resolution to emphasize the contour lines. In total, twenty unique topographic maps were created and placed along the golden path of the tables.

The GPS generated path and the 3D generated topographic maps become an inverted and imagined territory, all made possible through the combined interaction of satellite systems, algorithmic design, and human desire.