Video, Sound, Textile, Prints

Play Pretend (2026) is a moving image installation born out of Sondi’s ongoing archival project “Coding Blackness” that examines the performativity of Blackness as it is constructed through code, gameplay systems, and player interaction within video game worlds. It traces how bodies and gestures enter these systems, how they are transformed into data, and the stories that data is made to tell.

The work explores motion capture data of Black digital performance. Motion capture (mocap) is a technology that records the movement of people and objects, translating physical motion into digital data. These movements are stored within the architecture of the game, where they can be reused and assigned to different characters and contexts.

Through processes of digital excavation, this data is taken out of the games and assembled within a growing archive. In Play Pretend, these motion capture fragments are reassembled into an unstable theatre. The same fall, the same flinch, the same celebration returns again and again, now stripped of its original game environment and held in a bare, uncertain space. What is at play, and what is at stake? 

Play Pretend emerges as a new choreography. Seen side by side, layered and repeated, the motions begin to speak. Through this re-staging, the work listens for other possible readings, other worlds that might be held inside these gestures. Within this unstable theatre, Black digital bodies slip between capture and escape, rehearsing, again and again, the possibility of another story.

Coding Blackness is a work/archival research in progress currently in development during the Stage IX Residency for Immersive Arts & Research 2026/2027 in the Netherlands.

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