Delivery Dancer's Arc: 0° Receiver

Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver continues the story of Kim’s award-winning Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022). Made during the COVID-19 pandemic, the first work follows courier Ernst Mo and her doppelganger En Storm as they navigate a techno-futuristic Seoul under the eye of a tyrannical algorithm, expressed through a delivery app. Its mission is to control time through efficiency and productivity, reflecting how society pushes us towards self-optimisation and economic output.

In Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver, Ernst Mo and En Storm escape the endless maze of package pick-ups and deliveries. No longer ordinary couriers, they transport time itself across deserts, cities and different dimensions. Traversing different calendar mechanics and astronomical technologies, they’re tangled in networks of space and time that contradict and collide.

Through settings and dialogue, Kim evokes pre-colonial and non-Western knowledge systems, presenting an alternative to our increasingly fractured and accelerated life. By mixing ancient wisdom and navigation techniques with advanced technology and aesthetics, another possible world – and ways of moving through it – emerges.

How it was made
Ayoung Kim began by writing a detailed script, which ran over 60 pages. The work was shot using a combination of traditional filmmaking, CGI and videogame techniques.

Much of the footage was shot with actors on location, but the opening desert world, the kaleidoscopic zero-gravity space and other worlds were made in the videogame engine Unity. Kim also imported LiDAR scans of building interiors to Unity, allowing her to control camera angles in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

To create the animated avatars, Kim used motion capture footage of dancers and martial arts choreographers. The project required a skilled crew, including costume designers, 3D modellers, choreographers, CGI animators and sound designers.

Ideas of time and navigation
The artwork opens on the vernal equinox, a twice-annual period when the sun is exactly above the equator. It’s the only time global positioning systems (GPS), which track Ernst Mo and En Storm’s position and productivity, can be disrupted. This astrological event allows the duo to strike against the algorithm as part of a multiverse resistance.
The symmetrical stone structure seen at the beginning of the artwork is the Vrihat Samrat Yantra, an enormous sundial at the Jantar Mantar observatory in Jaipur, India. It represents an older way of keeping time, offering a counterpoint to digital interfaces like the Delivery Dancer app, which cheerfully gives Ernst Mo her delivery routes and directives.

When Ernst Mo and En Storm fall from the cliff, their own app and travel device, ‘Guest Stars’, activates. In the work, you can hear chant-like whispers counting time in different calendar systems, including Buddhist, Celtic, Persian, Hebrew, Hijri (Islamic), Shaka Samvat (Hindu), Jawa (Indonesian), Japanese, Lunar (Korean), Taiwanese and Gregorian calendars, as the characters are transported to other possible worlds.

Guest Stars’ was inspired by an unofficial app developed by drivers on the Indonesian platform Gojek. It also references an era before GPS when people would use stars to navigate and the sky to tell time.

South Korean sci-fi
While South Korea has a long history of science fiction literature, comics and cinema, its popularity exploded with the arrival of PCs in the 1990s. ‘Sci-fi clubs’ sprang up on the internet through chatrooms like Hi-Tel and the impact of online authors like Djuna, with fans able to connect and share stories. Contemporary films such as Space Sweepers (2021, Sung-hee Jo), Jung_E (2023, Yeon Sang-ho) and Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017) and Snowpiercer (2013) are major hits both at home and internationally.

Sci-fi screen references in Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver
Ayoung Kim has a longstanding fascination with sci-fi. In her extensive notes, she outlines some of the influences on this work. She describes the villain’s outfit as “somewhat like Neo in The Matrix (1999)”, pays homage to Æon Flux (2005) in a struggle between Ernst Mo and En Storm, and notes, “Creatures resembling jellyfish storm the city like the Zergs from [competitive multiplayer game] StarCraft (1998)”.

The doppelganger
In sci-fi, a doppelganger is a character's double, often a clone or parallel universe counterpart, exploring themes of identity, duality, and psychological conflict. Repetition of self by means of multiverse is one of the many nods to the sci-fi genre in this work.

Possible worlds theory
Possible worlds theory is a philosophical concept used to explore different ways reality might have been. For example, what if dinosaurs still existed? That scenario would be a possible world. Possible worlds theory helps us consider alternate realities that could exist if different choices were made or different events occurred.

Transworld entities
An individual in our world could have counterparts or even the same identity in other possible worlds. These counterparts or identities can have different properties or make different choices, but they are versions of the same entity. Ernst Mo is a transworld entity.

Ayoung Kim interview