Please join us for a seminar with Mendi + Keith Obadike, artists and musicians whose work encourages the public to listen together. Mendi + Keith will share music and film work-in-progress, including their mobile sound installation SlowDrag, a sonic procession commissioned by Counterpublic for the city of St. Louis.

Mendi + Keith Obadike are artists, composers, and writers. Their works sit at the intersection of art, music, and language and draw upon histories of experimental media art and performance. Their early collaborative projects were pioneering pieces for the Internet. Many of these early internet works were experiments in form and explorations of their concept of “social filters,” mechanisms that allow or deny access to specific identities in physical or digital spaces.

Since making these early digital works they have exhibited and performed at sites including The New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Projects include a series of large-scale, sound artworks that engage cities, architecture, and public space: Blues Speaker (for James Baldwin) at The New School’s University Center; Free/Phase at the Chicago Cultural Center & Rebuild Foundation; Sonic Migration at Tindley Temple in Philadelphia; Compass Song, an app for New York’s Times Square; and SlowDrag in the St. Louis Place community. Many of these projects created for physical sites ask what it means to listen in public space and explore ideas of listening communities.

This seminar is a discussion of a pre-circulated work. It can be found on the GIDEST site for attendees to read in advance.

This event is part of the bi-weekly GIDEST Seminars presented by the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought.