An Endless Conversation: The Art and Practice of Mendi + Keith Obadike

In 2001, artists Keith and Mendi Obadike put Keith's "Blackness" up for auction on eBay. While the company shut the audacious proposal down after several days, the work (part of their early black.net.art actions) was virally discussed and widely covered by the press.

Since those groundbreaking days creating pieces for an online audience, Keith, now a professor in the Department of Art at Cornell AAP, and Mendi, a professor in the College of Arts and Science's Department of Performing and Media Arts, have cocreated projects that investigate a wide swath of social topics using the tools of music, art, and language without hierarchy. This semester they are also coteaching Sound, Music, Public Space, the spring 2024 Urban Justice Lab offered as part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities series.

Source material for their work may be drawn from archives or headlines, and the performance may be presented in a gallery or along an urban street, but the work is always a conversation — one that begins between two collaborators in life and art, and then, with a turn toward the public, the dialogue continues.

Molly Sheridan: I'd like to start by going all the way back to the beginning of your collaborative work. Would you speak a little bit about what ideas and projects brought you together initially?

Mendi Obadike: We'd known each other for a long time before we started working together, and when we began, we were really interested in telling big stories that were musical and visual. We were working on the internet, because that was a place where you could bring out narrative, you could bring out music, you could bring out visual work without it being a venue that was primarily for something else. All the things had equal weight and we liked that.

Keith Obadike: We started doing these little online projects together in 1996, but from the beginning, we thought about those projects as happening in public space. So it was an inexpensive way to do these interdisciplinary collaborative works in what we thought of as a new public space.

MS: I was really engaged by the work that you've done across several pieces where you've taken data from often horrific source materials and translated them in such a way that they connect emotionally. Can you tell us a bit about the development of that work and the pieces that have come out of it?

MO: We deal with these databases of violence that have numbers that can be really a data dump. You have all this information, but you don't know how to process it. There are too many numbers, or there are too many pages even. And so in our projects what we do is we sonify just the numbers of these databasesOpens an external link. Our first one was Numbers Station [Furtive Movements], and that one is with data from the ACLU about police stops in New York City. The second one is Red Record, and that is data of lynching statistics that was gathered by Ida B. Wells-Barnett in her book Red Record. And the last one is Manifests, and the numbers for that are from slave ship manifests.

KO: That's how we started the numbers series project, but we've been making sounds from data or from code probably from almost the earliest days of our collaboration. I think most people think of code as something very exact, and society we think of as very inexact and messy. So we're always moving things back and forth between the world of code and the world of social interaction and the world of aesthetics, and we want people to think about how all of these things relate, because there's an aesthetics to code, there's an exactness to aesthetics, and there is a preciseness to what we try to produce in our social interactions.

MS: You were deep in the weeds during the early development of internet art and life, and now here we are in 2024, online in a way that has evolved so quickly and so significantly. How are those changes impacting the work that you do, or how you think about it, having made creative work along this trajectory?

KO: That project happened in St. Louis, and we worked with local musicians who remixed a song that we wrote. Local musicians were making the sounds, but the sounds were being played from car stereo systems, so this idea of an acousmatic Blackness was operating in that piece.

MO: For us, it was important that all of those local people be a part of the process. We made a song, but it also went through the community, through different musicians, and then through the people who drove their cars and were also part of how the sound got carried.

MS: I was actually interested in talking about that work, SlowDragOpens an external link, because with that kind of public presentation, you're meeting people where they are. So you might have the chance to share with people who wouldn't go to a concert hall or who wouldn't walk into an art museum, but you're also confronting people who weren't expecting to see or hear art that day necessarily, and maybe they aren't interested. Is there any way that you prepare for that tension?

MO: One of the ways that we try to do the work is by bringing the right energy. In this case, there were a lot of people in the process letting the people in the neighborhood know that there was going to be something happening.

KO: The project is a dialogue with the community and not just a procession, and that's what makes it successful. We worked with a great producer and had a community organizer named Mvstermind. We were working with an arts organization called Counterpublic. All of those things made that project work.

MS: You're both on faculty at Cornell now, and I know you have a teaching history that precedes that. How does that feed into your practice, working with students and doing this work? How do those elements talk to one another?

MO: Talking about the concepts or the practices with students, hearing their questions, seeing their work, always helps me understand what we're doing. There's another understanding that comes out of the process of talking about the work again with people who may not have experienced the work itself. We can think about the principles that come out of the work or that go into the work on another level.

KO: The class we're teaching now relates to what we've been doing over a number of years. We're only at the mid-semester mark, and I'm already thinking about how our work is going to be different because of what the students are sharing with us. That's a rich opportunity for us. I'm hoping it's transformative for the students, too, but I'm already inspired for the next projects from teaching that class.

MS: Because you are often either embedded in the community or performing right up next to your audience, have there been any remarkable interactions or any feedback that sticks with you as you move forward?

MO: Sometimes, a look on a face tells me that something that I wanted to happen is happening. Those are the things that actually really stick with me — when I see someone come out of an installation, and usually, it's a questioning look. Sometimes, someone has had that look, and they've said, "I don't know how to talk about that." And I'm like, "Oh, good. I think we're getting somewhere."