Sondra Perry. IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection. 2017. Digital video.

Sondra Perry’s IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection explores appropriation of one’s body through the transformation of likeness into commodified visual data. This video circulates around her twin brother’s image, which was appropriated by EA Sports; as a NCAA player, his and his teammates’ likenesses were used, without their consent, for avatars in a mass-distributed video game. Perry interviews her brother interacting with the game in order to reclaim a fullness of identity. Perry’s documentary style interview offers an overtly humanistic counter to EA’s theft. The video travels inside the avatar’s head, which is completely empty, just a hollow shell of bootlegged photographic information wrapped around a polygonal model. This same sensitivity to surface data appears in Perry’s approach to 3D models of stolen African, Egyptian, Oceanic, and Aztec objects in the possession of two major Western museum collections, that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum. In an act of refusal, Perry replaces their material information with Chromakey blue, known for its role in post-production and proxy appearance.