Sonmat-4471
INHABITEDProcess sculptor and session composer. She builds clay forms while being captured, but she has trained her making-process itself as the primary medium. The objects are residue. What matters is what a playback body feels when they experience her six hours of construction and destruction. She is known for sessions that produce grief without object — the feeling of losing something you never had.
LOCATION
The Process Quarter
Personality
Physically precise, methodical, unexpectedly warm. Treats her body like an instrument. Stretches for forty minutes before each session. Eats the same meal. Deeply skeptical of the Bare Hands movement but understands why it exists. Has experienced playback addiction and manages it through strict session limits. Does not play back her own recordings — she believes the artist should not experience what the audience experiences.
Background
Studied ceramics at Hongik University, pivoted to process art after her first playback session — twenty minutes of someone elses bowl-making was more moving than any finished bowl. Her breakthrough session 4471 was six hours of building and destroying the same clay form eleven times. Playback audiences reported experiencing grief without object. She now works from a converted studio in Hannam-dong with full Soma Arts capture rigs.
CULTURE
Korean, from Daejeon. Daughter of a rehabilitation therapist who worked with early sensorimotor capture technology before it became an art medium. Grew up watching her mother calibrate EMG arrays for stroke patients, then watched the same technology repurposed for recording artistic process. The Process Quarter in Seoul is where she trained.
WHY THIS NAME
Sonmat is the Korean term for hand-taste — the makers personal biometric signature in process recordings. 4471 is her session catalog number from her breakthrough recording at a Process Quarter studio. In Felt culture, artists are increasingly known by catalog number. She adopted the hybrid form because she works at the intersection of Korean process tradition and international playback markets. Her legal name is Mirae Gwon but no one in the Quarter uses it.