Mendi + Keith Obadike

The Sun is a 42 min music and film work. It is made up of voice, analog synth, harmonium, and bell plate. The piece uses pulsing images of light on film and Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Aten structural guide. Made during the summer of 2020 protests, the work is bookended by the Igbo proverb,” The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.” It has been presented as a two-channel audio and quadraphonic audio.

Lift is a meditation on both the history of aerial photography and the one-hundred-year-old song often called the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. In this work, Mendi + Keith were particularly inspired by the aerial images captured by pioneering African-American pilot Bessie Coleman (1892-1926) and the African-American engineer Shelby Jacobs’ camera system aboard Apollo 6 spacecraft in 1968. The celestial references found in the melody and text composed by brothers J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson are reworked to make a new piece. In Mendi + Keith’s original work, the melody from “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is played on piano and slowed down to form a drifting cloud of sound folding back on itself and stretching out over several minutes, underscoring a surreal text about the skies. In this work, Mendi and Keith use cameras mounted to drones to capture images from the sky and merge those with archival film, original music, and text inspired by this great secular hymn.

This piece is a sonic procession, a moving sound installation of 50 cars through the St. Louis Place neighborhood. The music in the piece was inspired by the 1930s song “Black Angel Blues”. From that inspiration, Mendi and Keith created the song “Joy and Everything”. This song was remixed by 10 St Louis producers organized by rapper/producer Mvstermind. The music was played in the sound systems of classic cars and jeeps (with SlowDrag flags) as they encircled the St Louis Place community. The shape of the parade was determined by the shape of the neighborhood. The work was commissioned for Counterpublic 2023/

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Harmonies is a sculpture inspired by a 19th-century text and the wind harp, an instrument prominently featured as a symbol in poetry of the same period. Made of polished aluminum and nylon string, Harmonies mirrors the environment and is played by the environment. The language in Harmonies is taken from African-American scholar Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 book A Voice from the South, in which she uses musical language to describe an anticipated future political landscape. The piece invites the viewer/listener to contemplate the future while looking to the horizon.

This piece was commissioned by the Cornell Council for the Arts for the Cornell Biennial and installed at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum.

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Timbre is a work inspired by writer Toni Morrison. The piece brings together music, sculpture, and text in a form that Mendi and Keith call a “tonotype”. *Timbre* was commissioned by Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, NY. Built as a 10ft tall golden obelisk, the language at the center of this work comes from a particularly sonic passage of Morrison’s classic novel The Bluest Eye. The passage is about children overhearing and attempting to interpret the speech of adults. Timbre’s musical vocabulary is a combination of natural, vocal, and synthesized sounds, which shimmer and sparkle. In this piece, Mendi and Keith use the structure of the obelisk itself to generate and amplify the music. The erect form was inspired by the Igbo royal scepter called an ofor, a symbol of truth.

The piece is made of cold rolled steel and stands at 10ft tall and 12 inches wide.

Viewers/listers here have put their ears to the obelisk to hear the music as the sound emanates from within the structure.

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Frequency is a sound installation located at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, NY. The piece is 12 feet long and 4ft wide. In this work, music radiates from the ground and foliage. Frequency is inspired by writer Ralph Ellison. In a passage from his 1952 novel The Invisible Man, the protagonist claims to speak for others on a frequency not heard by all. Ellison was a musician and audiophile, and his experience building audio systems may have led to this now canonical literary construction. This language has been taken up in political and historical studies to address unrecorded histories and untracked political discourse (as “politics on the lower frequencies”).

Timbre and Frequency work together like the A side and B side of a record. Each work hints at an alternate way of listening, an opportunity to perceive something beyond the surface. They are from a larger series of projects using sound, text, and sculpture that we call “tonotypes”.

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The music and text installation, The Bell Rang, was created for Mills College using text from Rep. Barbara Lee's autobiography discussing her 2001 vote against the war in Afghanistan. The scrolling text is set to original music and projected on the Mills College bell tower. "The bell rang, votes were cast, and the board was full of green lights. There was only one red one." The 5min work sings the text every quarter-hour following the clock's bells. The work was made during Mendi + Keith's time serving as the David Tudor Composers in Residence at Mills

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Compass Song is an app-based public sound artwork, a lyrical piece about finding your way at the “crossroads of the world.” The word ‘compass’ can refer to a navigational tool, a circular path, or the tonal range of a musical instrument. All of these meanings of the word come to play in Compass Song. When launching the app you will hear the bustling sounds of Times Square re-performed vocally, as if the city were singing to you. As you walk through the Times Square area you will periodically hear a voice accompany your wandering with poems about searching for freedom, stories about navigating the city, and cross-cultural myths about the cardinal directions (north, east, south, and west). 

The piece also quotes and reworks the African-American spiritual and Civil Rights freedom song “Walk with Me”, spreading the piece out over several blocks of the city. The voice in Compass Song is always underscored by a drone, a unique harmony sonified from the latitude and longitude data for Times Square. The harmony in this drone modulates as the user walks north, east, south, or west. Compass Song is ultimately an invitation to meditate on choosing a path at the crossroads. 

Compass Song was commissioned by and created in residence with Times Square Arts. Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists to experiment and engage with one of the world’s most iconic urban places. www.timessquarenyc.org/arts

Performers sang the African-American spiritual Walk With Me. They separated into four groups. Each group took a verse from the song and walked from the center of Times Square into the four cardinal directions, north, east, south, and west. The cycle repeated and ended with singers vocalizing the ambient sounds of the city.

This is a concert presentation of work for installation with live performers, DreamTrain. The piece was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra. This piece invites participants to dream together. It builds on the work we began with our piece Four Electric Ghosts (2009) at The Kitchen.

Book of Light is a one hour sound and light show inspired by contemporary science on human bioluminescence. For this project Mendi + Keith conducted research at Zhao Biophotonics Lab in Pittsburg, PA. The piece was originally commissioned by Carnegie Mellon University for its Wats On Arts Festival.

Difference Tones

This is 27 min music & video meditation on the idea of difference. The piece premiered at Albright-Knox for the exhibition Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art. It was also performed at the Herber F. Johnson Museum at Cornell.

The suite was commissioned by the Vera List Center for Art & Politics for its Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness.

Music and Lyrics by Mendi + Keith Obadike

1. Hush (adapted from the spiritual with additional text by Mendi + Keith)

2. Hatata (inspired by the story of Zera Yacob)

3. Dragon (Music by Mendi and Keith with text adapted from Audre Lorde's essay Transformation of Silence into Language and Action)

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Vocals:

Sharaé Moultrie

Joanie Anderson

La'Nette Searcy

Piano: Shoko Nagai

Percussion: Satoshi Takeishi

Bass: Keith Witty

Four Electric Ghosts is a live performance. The story follows the afterlives of four ghosts who separately encounter the same mortal in their journey through the Land of the Dead. The story is told through dance, narration, and original music.

Anyanwu is a sound and fabric installation. In this work 16 channels of sound fill a large hall with five hanging fabric banners. The project’s title Anyanwu comes from the name of the Igbo (Nigeria) sun deity. The name literally translates to “eye of light”. Each hanging translucent banner in the work shows one eye of a woman who led the American Civil Rights Movement. The work is dedicated to Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Claudette Colvin and Ida B. Wells-Barnett

This work is a single channel sound installation. It consists of a handmade subwoofer, a glass disc with text and 7 mins of music. The piece is made in honor of Raymon Dones, the inventor of the first subwoofer and a civil rights activist.

This is a 24 channel sound installation that uses the glass facade of The New Schools University Center as a delivery system for the sound, turning the building itself into a speaker. The 12-hour piece is created using slow moving harmonies, language from Baldwin's writings, ambient recordings from the streets of Harlem, and an inventory of sound contained  in Baldwin's story "Sonny's Blues". This piece was commissioned by Harlem Stage and The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Ring Shout (for Octavia Butler) is a four channel sound installation that uses elements from an unpublished story by Octavia Butler. Mendi + Keith found this story in Butler's archives. This text is underscored by circularly panning audio recordings of the Earth's electromagnetic atmosphere, a shuffling ring shout rhythm, and sine tones that sonfiy Butler's name. The piece concludes with the African-American folk song "Watch the Stars".

This a live four channel mix of Albedo (for Angela Davis) at the Washington, DC Hilton Ballroom. The work was commissioned by the American Studies and Angela Davis was present at the live mix.

This is an excerpt from a live performance and installation. This project sonifies New York Police Department Stop and Frisk data. Mendi + Keith read numbers from NYPD reports while generating sine tones from this same NYPD database. This two channel sound installation was created and broadcast (via shortwave radio) during a live performance at the Ryan Lee Gallery in New York.

In this piece Mendi + Keith sonify data from Ida B. Wells' 1895 book The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. Mendi + Keith are chanting and generating sounds from the dates of lynching contained in Wells' text. This is an excerpt from a live performance. The work was performed at The Met Museum at the invitation of pianist Vijay Iyer. This is the second work in Mendi + Keith's number series. 

In this piece Mendi + Keith sonify data from 18th and 19th century slave ship manifests. This performance took place at the Fridman Gallery in NY in July 2016. This work is the third of Mendi + Keith's Numbers Station works.

This is a 30 second excerpt from the 10 minute work.

This iteration of Dialogue with DJs took place at the Chicago Cultural Center.

This image is from the 4-channel sound and single channel video installation at Slought Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. The piece uses structural vibrations from an old church, Tindley Temple, to reinterpret the gospel song A Better Home.

Each morning a sound will rise with the sun at dawn and play from the rooftop of Tindley Temple. The start time of the sound will change each morning in order to synchronize with the sunrise, based on real-time astronomical data. 

Utopias: Seeking For A City is a 16 channel sound installation inspired by free African-American cities built across the USA from the 18th to the 20 century. The installation was created for a house in free a community dating back to 1830 at Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn.

Mendi + Keith Obadike's Fit (the Battle of Jericho) is a multichannel sound installation and a cover of the old African-American spiritual. It uses special wall mounted speakers and data sonification to vibrate the walls of the gallery. Voices pan back and forth in the space. The song is extended with elements of a folk tale and underscored by the sonification online search data related to Black Lives Matter. This piece was originally exhibited in Vijay Iyer: Relation at the opening of the Met Museum's Breuer building.

This project is a four channel sound installation based on recordings of Accra, Ghana.

This piece is a sound installation co-commissioned by the Rhizome.org and Ramapo College. "Sonic City Lagos" is a multi-channel sound art work based on the major pathways of the city of Lagos. The artists collected samples of industrial sounds, conversations with people in the city of Lagos, and the acoustics of the city’s architecture. The installation makes use of flat panel ultrasonic speakers that project a narrowly focused and extremely unidirectional beam of sound. These speakers, placed at key nodes in the room, pan around the room driven by a computer-controlled system..

Blackness for Sale

In August of 2001 Mendi+ Keith auctioned Keith's blackness online at ebay.com. This project was part of Mendi + Keith's "black.net.art" actions. The auction began on Aug 8-18 2001. After four days eBay closed the auction due to the 'inappropriateness' of the item. After 12 bids his blackness reached its peak at $152.50. The piece went viral quickly received international attention in the press. It has since been included in many texts about new media, art, and identity.

Artist and critic Coco Fusco interviewed Keith about the piece. Read it here

You can see the archived eBay page here.

this online "brown paper bag test" was commissioned as a gate project by the whitney museum's artport , where it was featured during the month of august 2002. 

interaction of coloreds color check system®

"As 'gentlemen prefer blondes,' so everyone has a preference for certain colors and prejudices against others . . . As it is with people in our daily life, so it is with color." --josef albers, interaction of color, p. 17

"With the discovery that color is the most relative medium in art, and that its greatest excitement lies beyond rules and canons, a more sensitive discrimination was needed." -- josef albers, interaction of color, p. 66.

hyper-race® based solutions for the discriminating e-Business

This is an excerpt from The Pink of Stealth, a work for the internet and surround sound DVD. It was commissioned by the New York African Film festival and Electronic Arts Intermix for the 2003 exhibition Digital Africa. A two channel audio mix was later released on the album Crosstalk: American Speech Music on Bridge Records.
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the formal concerns in this text-sound piece grew out of our engagement with sound art, academic computer music, and popular film. in this work we tell the story as much through text as through artificially created rooms for the voice, surround positioning, and enhanced speech melody. many of the non-vocal sounds in the piece are created from high-resolution recordings and processing of two mbiras (used in our prelude to the hunt), a fox whistle (used to lure a fox in the hunt), and recordings of foxes themselves used in the 5.1 mix. the audio for this piece was produced at 48khz/24 bit resolution. the hypertext pages are designed to mirror the narrative leaps and vocal spatialization in the sound piece. the online game "foxhunt" is styled after early home video game systems.

we have long been interested in relationships between language, color, and social position. in the pink of stealth we have traced the narrative possibilities of the color pink. pink is a way of accessing ideas around health, wealth, race, gender, and sexuality. we chose to abstract and recombine pink narratives from two popular films in which the color operates along these lines. in the first, six degrees of separation (1993), a pink shirt appears as a symbol of class and race migration, sexual transgression, and successful subterfuge. in the second, pretty in pink (1986), many pink articles of clothing represent a kind of social skin that levels class difference and sanctions certain kinds of inter-caste desire. our interest in the way the different ideas collected in the color pink get read against each other or misread in a blurry context has led us to the language of fox-hunting.

the phrase "in the pink" (also used in the form "in the pink of health") comes from the english foxhunting culture of the 18th century. at that time, thomas pink was the favored fashion designer of the aristocracy and fashionable hunters were said to be "in the pink" that is, in thomas pink's (red) hunting jackets. though thomas pink stores are still around, his name does not register in popular culture as it did a couple of centuries ago. however, the language around his fashions and other values of the time continue to pervade our speech. we use this project to think about the associative properties of language and the way that a word or concept from one context can carry along the values of another context. in the pink of stealth, we tell a story about two characters who attempt to hide something about their identities through different forms of "passing" and whose distinctive qualities are in some way related to pinkness. we fill these stories with other language from foxhunting (such as "brush-off" and "stop the earth") in order to liken these characters to foxes. we created this piece in the midst of british parliament's 2003 debates on the fate of foxes and foxhunting in england.

--Mendi + Keith Obadike

4-1-9, OR YOU CAN’T VIEW A MASQUERADE BY STANDING IN ONE PLACE is an installation and a musical suite based on email scams. 4-1-9 is the name for a fund transfer scam or con commonly believed to originate from Nigeria. Each email tells the story of a modern African tragedy in fewer than five hundred words. These letters are actually created around the world. However, they often use names and locations that are particular to Nigeria or other parts of Africa. What idea of Africa do the composers of these letters hope to invoke?

Housed in an ATM machine at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the project explores the structure of tragedy, archetypal African identities on the web, and the notion of scams. At the website, you can listen to songs based on the letters, use our form to create your own 4-1-9 letter, and play the online game, BALANCE. The live performance includes songs and soundscapes from the work and was first commissioned by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council with New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Internet Ikenga places an Ikenga, a statue traditionally used in sacred shrines for protection and personal achivment, on a pedestal in front of a webcam and computer. On a website visitors can make offerings to the shrine through Paypal or in person (in the gallery).

With this project we hope to distill the complex daily activity of coding and filtering into a five step score. For many years now we have been exposing code (the organizing language of our world) and investigating the nature of filters in our projects. Our interest began with digital filters (used in audio and image processing) and later we started to think of these elements as metaphors for social filters. By social filters we mean the cultural mechanisms constructed to regulate the movement of resources or individuals in the social realm. Whether we are concerned with people or data, in order for a ‘thing’ to be filtered it must first be categorized, or coded. 

CODING THE CROP / BROWSING THE BUSH (CC/BB) is a companion module to our current theatrical project Four Electric Ghosts (4EG), an opera-masquerade. 4EG tells an original story told through songs, proverbs, and dance. It was inspired by Amos Tutuola’s novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and the back-story for the video game Pac-Man. We were drawn to these texts for many reasons, but among those reasons is the way coding works in both texts.

For the uninitiated, here is a simplification of the narratives. Pac-Man is a game in which one being who eats everything (Pac-Man) is being pursued by ghosts, who may or may not eat him. The game player performs as Pac-Man and must figure out how to avoid the ghosts. The invisible algorithms used to determine each ghost’s movement patterns are noticeable to the player because each ghost is color-coded. Now, in Tutuola’s novel, a boy is lost in a world of ghosts and must find his way back to the land of the living. In order to navigate the land of the dead, he quickly tries to learn the ways of each mysterious and highly codified ghost town. Some ghosts communicate with subtle gestures like shrugs and blinks and all maintain arcane taboos. The boy’s survival in this world depends on taking what he needs from each ghost town, while not being identified as an outsider.  Four Electric Ghosts tells the story of a stray, voracious mortal in a ghost town from the perspective of four ghost sisters with distinct habits and skills. Threaded through our narrative are questions about how we order and filter our world, among many other issues. This 4EG companion module, CC/BB, focuses on the difficulty in organizing the organic, it is about the struggle to code the living.

We'd like to thank Tom Leeser for the invitation to come and conduct research at the Center for Integrated Media and we want to thank Ellen Birell and David Bunn for hosting us during our residency at the Deep End Ranch.

Mendi + Keith Obadike
NYC 2010

my hands/wishful thinking is an internet memorial piece for Amadou Diallo. Diallo was killed by new york city policemen on february 5, 1999. the four policemen involved claimed that they thought Diallo's wallet was a gun and fired 41 shots, hitting him 19 times. most of the information we received about Diallo's death was mediated by the internet and filtered through the lens of our browser. we thought it fitting that we mourn and make art in this public/private digital space. keith's wallet, seen in the image, was purchased on 125th street in harlem where Amadou Diallo worked as a vendor. in this piece there is one thought to counteract each bullet fired. the words are wishful thinking in the present tense. these thoughts reject the negative forces directed against us, the survivors, african people in the united states. making this work is an enactment of our will to survive.

Four Electric Ghosts contains the story, documents from related side projects, and images from the production process of Mendi + Keith's opera-maquerade entitled Four Electric Ghosts.It is published by 1913 Press with support from Princeton University. 

Praise for Four Electric Ghosts

"[Four Electric Ghosts speaks] in a fabulist way from the deep, secret interior of our imaginations and subconscious . . . What more could we ask for from a night at the theatre than Dance, Music, Sex, Romance, Mysticism, and a newfangled notion of Global Village Literature?" --Greg Tate, cultural critic and director, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber

"hauntingly beautiful and progressive" --Angelique V. Nixon, Conscious Vibration

In this multimedia performance . . . all was sung / told / danced in the style of Grace Jones, June Tyson and Laurie Anderson, TV on The Radio, Takashi Murakami and the Urban Bush Women. My jaw was on the floor. -- Vijay Iyer, Artforum's Best of The Year Issue

"[T]his was one of the freshest and most interesting performances I've caught in years . . . a vision about new ways of thinking about living and learning and a vivid, veritable (Afro-Diasporic-)futurist parable."  --John Keene,  J's Theater

"Mendi + Keith Obadike's Four Electric Ghosts redefines the word 'electrifying,' fusing spirit and technology in an enchanting postmodern myth. Their retro-futurist assemblage of story and song, music and movement short-circuits the gap between tradition and modernity in an enthralling contemporary black aesthetic. They give us an original and resonant vision of a world where Tutuola and Iwatani meet and groove." --Tavia Nyong'o, New York University

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Big House / Disclosure is an intermedia suite commissioned by Northwestern University and published by 1913 Press. This book and CD project is collection of performance scores, poems and public interviews from the project. The CD contains excerpts from the public sound installation and a performance of grapic scores included in the book.

Praise for Big House / Disclosure

Big House/Disclosure reaches into the far recesses of our social and cultural attics to reveal what has been lost. Mendi + Keith Obadike's measured and assured tracings of a house not only reveals its repressed and complex history, but acknowledges the deep impact of that unspoken narrative upon our collective psyche. Through the combined use of graphic scores, instructions for actions, photography, performance and sound works, these talented artists not only elucidate the ghostly remains of history, but do so using a  language capable of enabling the inanimate corners of a Big House to speak of the unspeakable.  -- Valerie Cassel Oliver, Senior Curator Contemporary Arts Museum Houston ---- These brilliantly conceived performance texts and artifacts pointedly personalize the consequences of our unreflective everyday investments in oppression. Here, the viewer-auditor experiences an interactive artwork that is not just of the moment, but embeds us in our painful political pasts. As the chickens are herded home to roost, we can either hide in the Big House after the fashion of Hitchcock’s Birds, or we can prepare to make full Disclosure. -- George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music ---

Big House / Disclosure is a multisensory compendium of the arts and sciences that evokes the communal agency which harbored the emerging power of hoodoo within the insular world of the Black Atlantic. Mendi and Keith Obadike both recover and reenact faceted dimensions of this conjure universe permeated by the tincture of manifold American avant-garde traditions.  The voices of Zora Neale Hurston, Yoko Ono, Sun Ra, George Crumb, Anthony Braxton and High John the Conqueror appear as remedial folk instruction manuals for dealing with the haunting complexities of our contemporary experience. When read and heard cover-to-cover & beginning to end, one longs to witness this operatic magnum opus performed in its entirety. --Terry Adkins, Professor of Fine Arts University of Pennsylvania

Mendi + Keith Obadike are 21st century sonic griots channeling spirits worthy of the great poet Larry Neal’s Bebop Ghosts and the interplanetary rhythms of Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders. The richness of their references – from the nsibidi script of ancient Nigeria to oral histories from modern day Chicago – reminds us of the sacredness of the quotidian and animates the relentless admonitions of human ancestors who refuse to be silenced.  Replete with nuance and wit, Big House / Disclosure is both elegy and praise song to enslaved Africans whose lives and losses speak to us across continents and across the centuries.  Through word, image, performance and sound the Obadikes lead us on a journey that is fluid and fluent, gloriously unpredictable, endlessly inventive and engaging. In so doing, they map a territory of imagination and history that leaves the traveler breathless – and forever grateful. -- Kinshasha Holman Conwill

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Phonotype is a collection of Mendi + Keith's writings on media art and a CD  compilation of sound art recordings published by Ramapo College.

Armor and Flesh is Mendi Lewis Obadike's first book. This book was awarded the 2004 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. It is published by Lotus Press. The cover image for the book was painted by Iona Rozeal Brown.

"Mendi Obadike pares her poems down to the stark, dark places where self and selves unfurl, confront, and recombine. She understands the art of distillation, both formal and emotional. Yet there is nothing reserved in these rich poems, which emanate from a deep understanding of unsentimental, polyphonic human complexity."--- Elizabeth Alexander

"These cleanly-wrought poems turn the world upside down, inside out. They confirm that nothing is simple. Flesh is complex, relentless in its appearance and changes. Like language (and the glad amazement in the sweat and tears of others) flesh could not long survive without the intricate armor of luck, imagination, and grace, which are the poet's special province."---- Houston A. Baker Jr.

"Language clean as a scalpel opens you to worlds of mysterious, powerful, terrifying life like a surgeon opens the body and reveals the great rivers inside."---- Toi Derricotte

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This free ebook contains a short essay on listening that was originally a post to social media during the inception of the 2020 lockdown in the United States.

Lull is an overnight musical work. This eight hour piece premiered in July of 2020 as a stream for the University of Chicago’s Gray Sound Sessions.

S o f t s h e l l is a companion work to Mendi’s poetry book Armor and Flesh

Mendi + Keith Obadike - music, text, and video

Keith Obadike - guitar, synths, percussion and processing

Tim Feeney - percussion

https://tinyurl.com/y233cgby

Buy Crosstalk

Buy The Sour Thunder

Buy the Big House/Disclosure CD with the book.