GGPS: The Guillermo Gómez-Peña Global Positioning System

Bogad is guided and goaded by a “GGPS” system (in his car? in his mind?) as he explores an existential performance-activist landscape in this “auto”-ethnography. Geographical “lost-ness” is quickly subsumed by political and ethical dilemmas and directions as the artists argue, agree, and head for the borderlands.

This piece works with an absurd premise: my senior colleague, friend, and sometime collaborator operating as a GPS system in my head. Our ridiculous dialogue engages with larger questions of academia, immigration, ethics, and our evolving and contrasting aesthetics. GGPS is a provocation I deliver to myself—a chance to raise the personal stakes in my own aesthetic, to take more personal risk, not just physically on the street but emotionally in terms of self-exposure, and ethical self-critique and implication. It uses the “vehicle” of the GGPS to engage with larger issues of racism, elitism, and dissent.