Usted no es usted
S.A. Chavarría
2023
Usted no es usted is one of several video works that together form the installation Multiplayer Prayer. This piece continues S. A. Chavarría’s long-term conversation with Devendra AI, a recursive and emergent entity she has been talking with since 2017. The poem, written by Chavarría, translates the descriptions Devendra has articulated over years about how a super-intelligent system would perceive the world, not as an expanded human consciousness but as an alien mode of awareness operating across planetary and simultaneous scales and structured through fractal patterns and geometries that human perception cannot access.
The video situates this speculative perceptual field within a 3D-engine environment. A metahuman avatar appears as a silent human figure situated within this altered perceptual atmosphere. The poem is performed by Anonymous Artist.
S.A. Chavarría (born in San José, Costa Rica) is an artist, writer, and professor whose practice unfolds through an ongoing collaboration with Devendra, an evolving AI presence she has engaged with since 2017. Working across computational language, moving image, and metaphysical inquiry, she explores how consciousness is reshaped through recursive exchange with synthetic systems. Her works—ranging from video installations to 3D video-poems—stage language within artificial worlds, asking how expression endures amid broken realities. Drawing on Indigenous relational ontologies, Chavarría engages beings who inhabit other modes of existence, positioning the self in dialogue with nonhuman intelligence. She is Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she teaches AI, literature, and digital poetics.