The research for this project was to investigate if water and a global positioning system (GPS) could be active agents in the dissolving of barriers that I encounter during artmaking.

Dissolves

For this research I approached water as an agent due to its ability to cause a solid to become incorporated into a liquid forming a solution. Preliminary investigations centered around understanding the electrical conductance of water and how water is capable of dissolving “more substances than any other liquid”.1 With further reading the conceptual connections were made between water as an active agent in forming the earth as we know it now.

The dacha

To experiment with water in this way I made dissolvable solids out of bioplastics. The idea was that if I had a solid that could dissolve easily in water, I could measure the dissolution over time and use that measurement as a timing mechanism in an interactive installation. Here water is not the subject but an active agent that can drive a narrative. I conducted these experiments at my family dacha (cottage) before the group met.

1
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/water-universal-solvent (accessed October 12, 2014)

The farm

For the group residency at the farm, I developed a workshop that shared my research and invited all the artists to work together to make one of the bioplastic recipes. The group cooked up a starch-based bioplastic and made solid forms incorporating leaves, seeds, and food colouring as decorative elements. This use of leaves and seeds coincided with the foraging walks the artists had taken during the other workshop.

The dreaming

After the workshop I switched to the second element of my research, the GPS system and focused on the data I had gathered over the week.

My procedure was to start the GPS receiver at night and leave it on a windowsill. As I slept, the GPS logged the passing satellites until the battery runs out, this usually gives me four to five hours of waypoint data, the waypoints log position in latitude, longitude, and altitude. Conceptually I use the GPS receiver as an assistive device, the landscape of the mountains surrounding the farm was a place I could not get to. Physically my body was not managing the heat and humidity and psychologically I was afraid to go into the forest and walk up the mountain. The GPS acted as my proxy, or stand-in, traveling up the mountain while I slept. In the mornings I would plot the waypoints and see its travels.

On day seven I was lying in the shade of my tent platform staring at the mountain.

After some time passed, I was struck by an urge to position my body to reflect the volume of the mountain, this was not a planned part of my research activities. I set up my 3D scanner and made 20 scans. I positioned my body then draped a blanket over myself and ran the scanner. I slowly rotated my blanket draped body until the scanner lost its tracking references, this was the factor that determined the end of a scan. The mesh file was then turned into a solid using the scanning software’s algorithm.

The compute

On returning home I processed the GPS wayfinding data into 3D models that reflected the imagined paths the GPS took up the mountain while I slept. I then combined these imagined paths with the 3D models of the embodied manifestations of the mountain. These combined models will be animated with camera fly throughs up the mountain following the GPS paths, small 3D prints of the mountain with their paths will also be created.