This work began in 2014 with a coffee mug. The mug read “You have the same amount of hours in a day as Beyoncé”.

Over the coming years I set out to find a way to explore the feelings this phrase and object produced in me: a sense of desire, but also of almost inevitable failure. The sense that we are all Beyoncé, only not yet—you just have to keep at it.

Two years later I found myself in the Arctic circle, pursuing the geographical-technological intersection. I had discovered that the northern most runway in the world, found in Longyearbyen on the Spitsbergen archipelago, was located at a latitude such, that the rotational speed of the Earth at this point was exactly equal to the top speed of the world’s fastest production motorcycle. That the runway was built running East to West offered to me the possibility that you could momentarily cease turning with the world.

Armed with this belief, I booked a ticket—via a number of connecting flights—to Longyearbyen, to the runway. I tried to call ahead to arrange my arrival and announce my intention, though the airport phone went unanswered.

At some point during my time on the island, the absurdity of the desire to complete this project folded back into the project itself, seeming to echo the bind of success and failure I had originally sensed in the mug. The project became about such desire, about the ideas we identify with, and what might become of us when such ideas breakdown.