Installation, custom horizontal planar 3D scanning machine, projection, software

Sleep Like Mountains enacts a process of digital embedding and embodying.

The installation measures the topography of a human body and compares it to geodata sets of Earth, searching for a most similar location, where the topography of the human body and Earth elevate and digitally situate in similar ways. It attempts to (re-)discover bodies in landscapes and vice versa. By exploiting the inherent reductiveness of digital discretization processes it opens up a virtual space where the essential categories of the human and the other-than-human can be imaginatively merged.

The installation consists of a custom horizontal planar 3D scanning machine, a projector and a software for finding similarities among the generated height data of a human to the height data of Earth. While the topography of the human body can be generated during the exhibition, the height data of Earth have been sourced from SRTM geodata.

As an artistic research project, this installation appends itself to a wider discourse on negotiating degrees of human emplacement in the world. It is an argument against absolute human exceptionalism and instead enacts a digital embedding and embodying process to visualize an imaginary where the human is seen as an intrinsic part of a more-than-human world.

• Sektion Section: Exhibition
• Programm Programme: Feelers, Sensors