Standup Dividual

Multi Media Self Performing Sculpture

“Standup Dividual” is a self-performing sculptural assemblage that unsettles the distinction between an object, its function, and the relations that make it recognizable. Constructed around a divided wooden chair, the work incorporates mechanical movement, illuminated imagery, a technological interface, and a looping soundtrack that juxtaposes the electronic rhythms of vital-sign monitoring with the sounds of deforestation.

Its two radically different aspects resist reconciliation into a single image. From one side, the sculpture presents an animated, quasi-organic configuration; from the other, it reveals a mechanical interface and the suggestion of a transport apparatus. A rotating upper element alternates direction, introducing a temporal cadence that continues independently of the spectator.

The work approaches the body not as a privileged measure of things, but as an assemblage of heterogeneous entities and exosomatic extensions traversing organic, mineral, and technological domains. Its performance does not culminate in an iconographic statement. Rather, it unfolds through shifting relations among the object, its movements, its sounds, and the spectator, who must physically negotiate its different aspects.

The stand-up comedian operates as a parallel performative register in “Standup Dividual”, introducing an anthropocentric familiarity that serves as a heuristic passage toward the nonhuman. Rather than endowing the sculpture with a surrogate human identity, the comic premise unsettles the expectations through which agency, expression, and recognition are habitually reserved for human subjects. The work thus employs anthropomorphism provisionally, not to reaffirm human exceptionalism, but to release the Anthropos from its privileged position as the measure of things.

This displacement extends to the conception of the human body itself, understood not as an autonomous and self-contained entity, but as a manifold of form and substance encompassing mineral sediment, fauna, flora, and fungi, along with exosomatic extensions such as tools, clothing, and shelter. The boundaries conventionally drawn between the organic and inorganic, the natural and artificial, become less determinate without necessarily dissolving the distinctions among the entities involved.

Scenes of human destruction can paradoxically reveal the intersections of these realms, exposing the insidious manifestations of human exceptionalism even when cloaked in the enlightened values it purports to dispense. Yet “Standup Dividual” does not simply invert the anthropocentric hierarchy. It operates within an extended field that, unlike augmented reality, does not radiate from a central subject but emerges from an assemblage among heterogeneities, instigating their transversal liaisons. Its performative objecthood comes into play through their shifting cadence, giving each encounter the possibility of new recognition..

Installation visualizations.

Alternate view showing control panel.