In my research-based practice, I am searching for patterns within the data my body collects in the act of living. I produce time-based images and performances for video that foreground digital tools and web-informed aesthetics to critically reflect the often overlooked gaze of the Black female-bodied subject for an audience. I approach questions of identity, memory, and culture through image making with a focus in computational processes, including AI image generation, experimental 3D animation, and lens-based image making. My heart lies in the relationship between technology and the human Spirit. My works are affect driven: as in, the point is The Point, With The Point being the works’ articulation of spiritual abjection. I am less interested in the Algebra of image-making, but in the algebra of it. That is, the patterns, logic, relationships, and meanings within the generation, reproduction, and circulation of images and the way that they perform.
I treat making as both research and performance; testing how images behave when translated across various material systems and sacrificing my body to absorb the voyeuristic gaze that falls upon it. My attraction to video lies in its resistance to material classification, and the possibility of its use in the manipulation time and the experience of duration. I see the screens and projections that hold my videos as something like frames, but more akin to windows or portals through which we can observe other, speculative worlds. With a background in 3D media, my interest in moving images embraces my attraction to composition and symbolism while solving my problem of a static, unresponding painting. In my work, I want the viewer to find themselves entering the image in front of them, both mentally but in a way that engages their embodied virtuality.
My work interrogates the relationship between a Black femme’s identity as perceived by others, and her interior being: as in, the relationship between ourselves as projected outside and its tension with the self that exists within. In the virtual worlds I construct, bodies and objects perform, shift meaning, and implicate the viewer in acts of observation. Inserting myself into my videos as performer allows me—positioning myself as the archetypal image of many characters—to escape the flattening power of a normative hegemony. Here, the elastic nature of moving images lends them the flexibility to connect with time, duration, and all at once in the representation of a psychic tableau. I am interested in the performances we don’t know that we are doing, and how those show up in pictures and on video. When a viewer encounters my work, I want them to find themselves in its affective, aesthetic nature, reexamining their own sense of subjectivity thereby freeing themselves from “I”.
- Shori Sims, 2026