Performance Abstract
PolyVlog Anatomica investigates how digital technologies reshape our understanding of embodiment by engaging not with what performance preserves, but with what it leaves behind. Structured through the PolyVlog, a multi-panel performance framework, the work disperses the body across simultaneous perspectives generated by a mobile phone camera, document projector, endoscope, and portable projector. These devices function not as neutral recording tools but as analytic instruments that fragment, magnify, layer, and redistribute the body, producing embodiment as an unstable assemblage of archives, technologies, memories, and lived experience.
The performance unfolds within a digital anatomy theatre–arranged with a skull, books, lamps, acetate archives, writing materials, and digital devices, the desk becomes a contemporary site of dissection, reflection, and knowledge production. At its center is the performer-scholar who simultaneously occupies the roles of sector, ostensor, lector, and cadaver-performer. Drawing from traditions of anatomy theatre while reconfiguring them through digital media, the work stages the performer as a self-experimenter who offers both body and body of work for examination.
PolyVlog Anatomica is organized into four parts. To Publish or to Perish introduces the transformation from historical anatomy theatre to digital anatomy theatre, tracing the shift from the criminal cadaver to the practitioner-scholar as specimen and analyst. ASMR Unboxing foregrounds the sounds and gestures of scholarly labor through the unboxing, handling, cutting, writing, and layering of acetate archives. Digital Dissection examines fragments of performance through acts of annotation, close reading, projection, and technological mediation, exposing artistic, scholarly, and embodied labor as visible performance. Finally, MonoVlog to PolyVlog reveals the work as an unfinished metawork–a talkback vlog distributed across multiple panels and perspectives.
By staging analysis as a live autopsy, PolyVlog Anatomica externalizes the reflective practice of the performer-scholar. Archives become repertoire, analysis becomes performance, and writing becomes embodiment. Rather than presenting a finished body of work, the performance foregrounds the ongoing labor of making, interpreting, documenting, and re-performing. In doing so, it proposes a digital anatomy theatre in which the body, the body at work, and the body of work converge as a living archive of embodied inquiry.
*A final requirement for Perf. Stud. 371: Performance and Digital Technologies under Prof. Dayang Magdalena Nirvana T. Yraola, PhD of the UP College of Fine Arts.