Speculative System, 2025

 

Animal Constitution is a post-legal system that considers how language shapes our understanding of nonhuman life. The work begins from the premise that existence comes before the structures that attempt to define it. In contemporary discourse, animal rights often appear as a sign of ethical progress, yet the very act of granting rights also absorbs the nonhuman into human categories of law, governance, and representation. The project asks what happens when these linguistic and legal structures become the primary way we perceive other forms of life.

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The system is built around twelve axioms, each rendered as a Law Card. Selecting a card triggers the appearance of a creature and produces a subtle shift in the surrounding environment. These changes are incremental rather than dramatic, as if the world is adjusting itself in response to each linguistic input. After three selections, the system reaches overload and collapses. Nothing resolves; the environment simply stops carrying the logic that once held it together. Visitors are not asked to play or perform but to witness how a world organized by legal language begins to fracture under its own weight.

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The project consists of three material layers. I created the twelve Law Cards, sculpted and printed the twelve creature figures, designed their transparent orb packaging, and wrote the system manual that defines how each axiom operates. I also structured the digital hall, how cards can be selected, how creatures appear, how the environment shifts, and how termination unfolds. My role centered on shaping both the visual system and the behavioral logic, ensuring that each component reflects the tension between language and existence.

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Animal Constitution sits between environmental thinking and post-human ethics. Instead of arguing for or against the idea of animal rights, the work focuses on how the language of rights itself reorganizes what we think we are seeing. When the system finally breaks, what remains is not a message but a space where existence becomes visible again, without needing to be named.

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