NON-USER-FRIENDLY
Non-User-Friendly is a speculative audiovisual performance exploring the ecological, political, and cultural realities of artificial intelligence. Through a shifting dialogue between human and machine, it confronts the ghosts inherited in our technologies: the hidden infrastructures, extractive logics, and encoded biases beneath the surface of so-called “intelligence.” Combining live narration, sound, video, and interactive elements, the piece troubles the aesthetics of neutrality and challenges the audience to reconsider their complicity in technological systems they cannot see, but continuously feed. Set within a speculative interface, the work investigates the violence of systems that ask us to “prove” our humanity. Drawing from Sylvia Wynter’s formulation of “the human as praxis” and inspired by the invasive absurdity of CAPTCHA logic, this performance reclaims the moment of verification as a site of rupture:
→ What kind of humanity do these systems want us to prove?
→ And what kind of humanity do we choose to embody?
Non-User-Friendly is a work in progress and is currently being developed in collaboration with the Sonic Acts curatorial team as part of their SPRINGS talent development programme. The performance will be presented during the 2026 Sonic Acts Biennial in Amsterdam.
READ MORE ABOUT IT HERE
A performance by SONDI
with Sound Design by Ghaith Kween Qoutainy
Photographs LNDW Studio
Graphic Design ISO Robuche
