CARLOS SANDOVAL


RECENT WORK  THE THRESHOLD  ABOUT CV


ARTIST STATEMENT


 

My practice moves across sound art, music scores, live drawing, mark-making, and mechanical sculpture because the question I keep asking cannot be answered by any single medium: what remains irreducibly human when behavior is increasingly structured by systems designed to predict, replicate, and optimize it? I work from the threshold — the performer reduced to measurable output, the automaton that trembles instead of performing precision, the human and the mechanical contaminating each other slowly and without resolution. That threshold — between Humans as Machines and Machines as Human — is not a metaphor. It is where the work lives.

In Maquina Latina, for instance, the score is the recorded shape of a pianist's failure to follow an accelerating metronome. On stage, he follows his own prior trembling — while his stop-motion double, life-size, watches from the screen. Two metronomes: one mechanical, one irreducibly human. My Monas invert the logic of Enlightenment automata, built to surpass human precision. Through crude mechanics — off-center weights and irregular cams, they capture exactly what a perfect mechanism was designed to eliminate: hesitation, vulnerability, the constant tremor of being alive. In the Post-COVID Series I used aborted AI processes to collapse images before any reliable results, then drew the results by hand — reintroducing hesitation where the algorithm were forced to abort form. In the Tent Visions drawings I draw trees in the dark, trying to translate what my dog senses at night rather than what I see. In these four examples, living and contingent processes are placed inside complex structures — and what the friction produces is the work.

I have lived between Mexico and Germany for over twenty years. That position — between cultures, between social registers — is the biographical version of the same threshold. I am interested in what survives translation. And in what, stubbornly, does not.

The dog senses. The tree sways. The automaton trembles. The birds don't come. You don't need to name what they know. You only need to stand close enough to feel that they know something.

 

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