Soft Sound Geographies:
Embroidered and Quilted Maps of Cycling Journeys and Data
This project is a mixed media quilting project where I use GIS tools, GPS data, and personal journeys to create quilts that tell stories from my life that showcase entanglements between data, the natural world, relationships, and myself. So far the project consists of two quilts which are overlaid with a projected video layer. The video is a complimentary quilt-like design, built from video clips, illustrations, animated gifs, and field recordings that are related to the journey of the quilt underneath. The synthesis of quilt and video bring together the animating labor of craft with the expressive and narrative media of film, layering intimate and feminist craft, data, and personal storytelling.
Publications and Exhibitions
Arts Track at ACM TEI 2025 in Bordeaux, France:
Heidi Biggs. 2025. Soft Sound Geographies: Textile Maps of Land Body Data Entanglements. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 105, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3707681
Queer Ecologies Group Exhibition at Fulton County Public Art Futures Lab
S/TE 2025; Title: ‘Going There’ at The Goat Farm
Details of the Projec
There are two quilts that explore questions that explore temporality, affect, movement via bicycle, data collection and representation, and relational ontologies.
The first quilt is 2 feet by 3.5 feet. It is a hand-embroidered map of a bike trip I took down the Mississippi River in 2022. I was curious about using bike travel to connect to the Mississippi River as a place, exploring histories of natural disasters like floods, and considering how they are connected to futures with climate change. The embroidery took over two years to complete and the stitches melt into the video projection of video, audio, and illustration. This quilt was shown at ACM’s TEI Conference in the Arts and Demos Track in Bordeaux, France in March 2025 and then the Fulton County Public Futures Lab in April 2025.
The second quilt is 4 feet by 4 feet. It is a newer work that explores the unexpected glitching of strava recordings captured during the early stages of a budding relationship with a fellow cyclist. These glitches were captured by GPS devices when they were parked in our respective homes, leading to the questions of how data glitches in the absence of movement, echoing the glitchy interaction between queer timelines and understandings when they interface with more heteronormative expectations of a linear life progression. I overlay this quilt made of maps with videos which move between riding a bike through Atlanta and still and ambient clips the interiors of our respective homes. Both quilts were shown together at the Goat Farm’s annual group art exhibition SITE in September 2025.
I hope to continue to explore the art and craft of embroidery and quilting, combined with video, in a long-term project of riding my bike down the Mississippi River, and in exploring queer and more-than-human (geologic) temporalities.
