Savage Alms

Savage Alms is a multimedia sculptural work exploring ideas of death within the context of digital environments. Here, we encounter the artist as both rendered dead and digitally immortalized — part of an ongoing project that speculates on our existence post-mortem. In this piece, I use my fingers to feel, speculate, and measure my own skull alongside digital tools like photogrammetry. The resulting iterations of the post-mortem self-portrait become speculative chasms of introspection. It is in the spaces, the gaps, and the fissures that thought and language may cascade away and something else be invited in. The work is an attempt at an honesty without the need for the didactic. It is an offering. A savage alms to a world post language. The world of the dead.

Umut Gunduz is a British-born Turkish artist whose PhD research at the University of Washington focuses on the relationship between the living and the digital. Within his practice, he uses video game technologies, photogrammetry software, and other digital tools in order to create what he calls speculative anatomies — artificially rendering things dead as a kind of performance. For this, he uses the autobiographical, and specifically self-portraiture, as a means of meditating on his own existence post-mortem. These versions of himself are perforations of the body, elements of which are digital, into the environment.