Our Amsterdam Art Week event GOODNIGHT is slowly approaching, promising a prefect context for visitors to familiarise themselves with some of the great creators working at ISO. For our collaboration with Amsterdam Art Week, we also took the opportunity to include a segment of The Live Art Series, for which we’re thrilled to present the audiovisual performance Non-User-Friendly by ISO resident Sondi!

During GOODNIGHT, Sondi will kick off the captivating night programme with her audiovisual performance Non-User-Friendly, exploring the boundary between what is recognised as human and what is refused as noise, error, or excess. The work investigates the violence of systems that ask us to “prove” our humanity. Sondi contextualizes this confrontation with the logic of CAPTCHA, or the “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” – a familiar security measure known as challenge-response authentication. As the fantasy of “user friendliness” unravels with this very measure, the opacity of humanness is challenged by addressing it as a crudely flat category. Non-User-Friendly approaches this tension in a conversation with a  virtual assistant bot modelled after the artist, who addresses its creator and the public with the phrase “are you human?”

Sondi’s work offers visions for worldbuilding against dominant constructs mediated through digital interfaces. During Non-User-Friendly she will guide a dialogue mirroring the context of us interrogating motives of digital constructs and digital constructs interrogating us; a live VJ setting where sound and visuals enmesh in a hyperreal world while the bot begins to take over, creating a wake of uncanny traces left by smooth operations, glossy surfaces, and by her words uttered. Drawing from Sylvia Wynter’s formulation of “the human as praxis” and inspired by the invasive absurdity of CAPTCHA logic, the performance reclaims the moment of verification as a site of rupture. Which kind of humanity should one prove to possess? As market forces rule the principles of technological development, ideals of just, equal worldmaking rarely make it to the forefront, when it desperately needs to. In these exploitative spaces, what dialogues should we instigate with nonhuman agents in the first place?

Join us on the 24th of May to experience the AV performance by Sondi
alongside a full day & night of celebration and art:
17:00-22:00 Open Studios by ISO residents, and installation by Sophia Bulgakova
22:00-22:30 Audiovisual Performance by Sondi 
22:30-05:00 DJ sets by BARROSKINI (live visuals by Sondi), DIORA, Krai and Tyrrfon
€12 tickets are required after 21:00 for Sondi’s performance and the afterparty which can be bought from the button below 

Sondi (she/her) is an artist and researcher from Germany, born in Cameroon and based in the Netherlands. Her practice centers on worldbuilding and worlding, particularly within digital spaces and video games. She explores the politics of representation in virtual environments—examining encoded biases, game mechanics, and the portrayal of people, places, and ecologies—while crafting worlds that foreground marginalized voices and perspectives often excluded from our techno-futures. Sondi builds these worlds primarily through immersive 3D videos engineered with game engines, continuously moving through virtual and physical spaces to reflect on the interplay between our corporeal, spiritual, and digital selves. Her body of work spans a wide range of mediums including game design, audiovisual performance, theatre, music, film, and education. Through speculative practices and critical play, she imagines virtual worlds as spaces for healing, resistance, and collective dreaming.

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