Q: What is the main focus of your practice?
A: Our work has evolved over the years, but many projects explore the aspects of sound, identity technology, and public space. We create immersive installations, sound works, and performances that investigate complex histories and social relations through music, visual art, and language.
Q: How did you begin collaborating as artists?
A: We started working together in 1996, creating online projects that combined narrative, music, and visual elements. We were drawn to the internet as a new public space where different media could have equal weight in our interdisciplinary collaborations.The online projects eventually led to showing our work in galleries, museums and physical public spaces.
Q: What was the "Blackness for Sale" project about?
A: In 2001, we put Keith's "Blackness" up for auction on eBay with a list of benefits and warnings. This piece commented on conceptual art, commerce, and how identity was beginning to function online. It sparked widespread discussion about race and digital spaces.
Q. Why do you work with sound?
A: Keith grew up playing music and composing. We started working with sound collaboratively from the beginning of our collaboration in the mid 90s. We are particularly interested in the power of listening and in how sound articulates space. By that we mean both architectural space and social space. Our 8-hour musical work, lull, a sleep temple, would be one example of the kind of shared experience we have tried to create with sound. We are inspired by the ways in which sound allows us to reach out and make contact across space and time. Our thinking about what sound does and what sound can hold has led us to our work.
Q. Why is your website called BlackSoundArt.com?
A: It began as an inside joke. In the 1960s Mendi’s parents co-owned a shop called Blackness Is…. It was a shop where you could find African and African-American arts, crafts, books, etc. The shop was equally about celebrating, questioning, and expanding notions of Blackness. When we started our first site in the 1990s we called it BlackNetArt.com as a sort of playful homage and later added the URL BlackSoundArt.com.
Q: How do you approach site-specific work?
A: We would say many of our projects are site-responsive. We conduct research driven by the location, which informs the text, images, and sounds we use. While some pieces are created specifically for a site, others can be adapted to different locations while maintaining their core concepts.
Q: Can you explain your "Numbers Station" series?
A: The Numbers Station series sonifies data related to racialized violence in American history. We perform databases of numbers from sources like stop-and-frisk data, lynching statistics, and slave ship manifests. These performances explore how violence is quantified and invite reflection on these histories and a visceral sonic experience.
Q: How do you use technology in making your work? Do you use special tools/apps?
A: We've used everything from custom software to scrapyard materials in our work. As John Coltrane said, "You can play a shoestring if you're sincere," so we focus on honest exploration in the work rather than getting too wrapped up in the tools.
Q: How do you work with historical archives in your art?
A: We often use archives to find what we call "ephemeral inheritances" - intangible cultural elements like music or sonic culture. Particularly with African American freedom songs and folk traditions, we see these as seeds that need to be replanted and reperformed to connect past and present.
Q: What is "acousmatic Blackness" and how does it relate to your work?
A: Acousmatic Blackness, a term coined by Mendi, refers to experiencing a sound associated with Blackness without seeing its source. In our public space works, we often work with this notion to engage communities in new ways.
Q: How does your teaching intersect with your artistic practice?
A: Teaching helps us understand our work and our world in new ways. Discussing concepts and practices with students, and hearing their questions provides fresh perspectives. Our current and future projects are often inspired by these interactions.
Q: How do you engage with communities in your public art projects?
A: Community engagement is an important aspect of our public projects. We collaborate with local artists, musicians, and organizers to create dialogues rather than just presentations. For example, Free/Phase we worked with well known DJs in Chicago to dialogue with the public about freedom, in our St. Louis project SlowDrag, we worked with local musicians to remix our song, Joy & Everything, and involved community members in the performance.
Q: How has your approach to internet-based work or media art evolved since you began?
A: In the early days, people saw the internet as an emerging curiosity, somewhat separate from society. Now, we're aware of how computing permeates our lives and how our physical and data selves are interconnected. While our work has expanded beyond purely online projects, those early explorations continue to inform our understanding of technology and society.
Q: What do you hope audiences take away from experiencing your art?
A: We start by trying to create an experience for ourselves, but we ultimately want to create deeply moving experiences that resonate with a global audience. We are pulling from this deep well of African-American and Igbo culture to reflect on universal questions like: 1) Who are we as human beings? 2) How do we connect to others? and 3) What is freedom? If we get these questions (not the answers) right in our work, then everything will be productively destabilized for ourselves and the audience. We hope that by exploring this intersection of sound, technology, culture, and human experience, we can invite people to leave the work with a renewed sense of empathy, curiosity about the world around them, and perhaps see familiar things in a new light.