Ernst Mo (an anagram of ‘Monster’) is a female delivery rider who works for Delivery Dancer, a fictitious platform in Seoul, South Korea. In this fiction, Seoul is a labyrinth of endlessly regenerating routes, and the Dancers (drivers) pursue never-ending delivery work under the control of a master algorithm called Dancemaster.

Continually pushed to optimise and complete deliveries at an ever-increasing rate, Ghost Dancers, the most advanced drivers, take unknown routes around the city to meet the demands of their workload. They move beyond usual temporal and spatial possibilities, travelling in ways that are not physically possible. On these deliveries, Ernst Mo’s path keeps crossing with another mysterious rider who challenges her ideas of time and labour, prompting her to question if another reality is possible.

Delivery Dancer’s Sphere and its accompanying game Delivery Dancer Simulation,  explore alienation and the gamification of work through the gig economy and platform labour, both of which became accentuated during the pandemic in South Korea. In a society obsessed with productivity and the optimisation of labour, time and the body, Ayoung’s work asks what might happen when these things begin to unravel, and can we imagine a world beyond it?