Standing Death Backward

The exhibition Standing Death Backward presents an installation of three life-size figurative sculptures, accompanied by yellow lighting gels over the gallery windows. Each sculpture was milled with a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine from digital scans of real-life performers—Ryan, Gustine, and Abriel.

The work is about violence and gravity—about the violence of capture, the deficiencies of rendering, and the infrastructural failures that underpin digital life. The blocky, approximate figures lie toppled, pressing against the wall or collapsed onto the floor, as if gravity returned the moment they fell out of the software. Using volumetric capture, the performers’ bodies were scanned—frozen in T-poses—becoming 3D digital assets, like puppets. Through Mixamo, a web-based platform housing a library of pre-made motion-capture animations, the scanned bodies were set in motion. Each sculpture is drawn from a single frame of three animations named Standing Death Backward, Corkscrew Evade, and Floating in the software.