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Carl Craig Sessions: Screening I

June 25–28, 2020, Dia Online

Event Details
In conjunction with Carl Craig’s Party/After-Party (2020) at Dia Beacon, Dia presents a cumulative platform of public programs exploring the legacy of techno through summer 2021. The Carl Craig Sessions join an ongoing and multivocal dialogue about techno’s emergence in Detroit’s underground as well as its reverberations worldwide. 

Originating in post-Fordist Detroit in the early 1980s, techno arose not only as an electronic music form, but also as an aesthetic and political movement committed to experimentation, counter-histories, and imagined futures. As artist and sound theorist Kodwo Eshun stated in 1995: “Detroit techno took music beyond the dance, into the chaos of electronics; inventing a history and a future, a direction and an ideal as successful as that other 1980s neologism, cyberspace.” 

Inviting artists, DJs, musicians, writers, and thinkers, the Carl Craig Sessions consider the sonic influence of techno. Devoting primary attention to archives of Black experience, the sessions also consider how techno challenges the racial capitalist relationship between human and machine to articulate visions of a transformative society. 

Carl Craig Sessions: Screening Series in Collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix 

Summer 2020 
This film series constellates some of the forms, mythologies, and politics present in the greater movement of techno.

Screening I 
June 25–28, 2020 

Tony Cokes
Black Celebration, 1988 
Co-presentation with the Hammer Museum 

Otolith Group
Hydra Decapita, 2010 

Techno City
What is Detroit Techno?
, 2000

Tony Cokes was born in 1956 in Richmond, Virginia, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he is a professor in the department of modern culture and media at Brown University. Since the mid-1980s, Cokes has produced videotapes and installations that question how subjectivities informed by race, gender, and class are produced through the representational regimes of the media and popular culture. Recent solo exhibitions and screenings of his work have taken place at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2020); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2019); and the Shed, New York City (2019), among others.

The Otolith Group is a collective and organization founded in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun and based in London. Its work spans moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation, and explores the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, inhuman, and nonhuman, as well as the complex environmental conditions of contemporary life. The Otolith Group was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010.

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