Mountains after Mountains VR (산 넘어 산)
““Mountains after Mountains VR (산 넘어 산)” is a virtual reality (VR) experience designed for individual invited “guests.” It centers one woman’s autobiographical account of her illegal abortion in South Korea in 2013.”
““Abortions aren’t allowed here, legally, but they are everywhere and don’t cost much. If it goes wrong, what happens to my body?””
““I started observing her, then I was her, then as I moved up I could see the whole situation from a different perspective.””
The experience is organized around four acts that lead the guest through a seemingly innocent children’s song about a mountain bunny looking for chestnuts to a song of grief that is a way of honoring the struggles that generations of women continue to face (mountains after mountains).
““It felt for me like all of the thoughts, all of the possibilities, all of the what-ifs...””
Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) is a collaboration between Amy Mihyang Ginther and Susana Ruiz, and their team Huy Truong, Patrick Stefaniak, Adam Kruckenberg, Leah Nichols, and Alessia Cecchet. Ginther originally wrote the text in response to a 2019 rise in US legislation that limited reproductive rights. At the time, a major social media narrative claimed that adoption is a legitimate alternative to abortion, and Ginther responded by sharing her own experience of having an illegal abortion as an adopted person. In this new 12-minute VR piece, invited “guests” choose if they want to witness Ginther’s experience of having an illegal abortion. Ginther articulates her solidarity with her Korean mother’s hardship and emphasizes the capitalist and patriarchal forces that limit the choices they could both make regarding their bodies. The text is part sung and part spoken in rhymed iambic pentameter verse. The experience incorporates photogrammetry, animation, and live-action elements filmed in volumetric (holographic) video.
The pills arrived in the mail
Would you like to stay or leave?
As creators, we use our work to resist present and future patriarchal, capitalist, and racist uses/processes/outcomes of and through media storytelling technologies. This project seeks to address Lisa Nakamura’s critique of most documentary VR. In “Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy” Nakamura argues that many forms of Documentary VR exploit marginalized trauma so that the user can feel good about feeling bad for the other, creating a false and toxic way to embody compassion. For this reason, we position the user of this piece as a guest that must be invited and, instead of inviting our guest to simply witness or embody Ginther’s abortion, we employ interactive and aesthetic elements that create tension between the cute, harmless, sentimental aesthetic of the Korean children’s song Santoki and darker, sociopolitical implications within the lyrics. As the experience progresses, the guest becomes disoriented and overwhelmed so they experience a more abstracted and personalized sensation akin to what Ginther and her mother experienced, without relying on their stories being overly exploited. With the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade, this project has taken on profound new significance for us.