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.

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?

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.

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.

And you dove right in, right? Maybe the eBay piece was the major work of that time, or at least the most widely talked about?

That was a thing that had a life of its own! In 2001 we posted my Blackness for sale on eBay with a list of benefits and warnings. We thought of it as commenting on this commerce site and the way identity was starting to function online. This was before people were really calling things social media, but there were online communities where people were playing with identity in different ways.

How important is the context of where the piece will be presented to most of these projects? I’m thinking of work such as The Bell Rang, which was projected on a bell tower at Mills College, but then there’s American Cypher, which has been installed in different locations and in different ways. How does that play into the creative soup of what you’re organizing?

A lot of our things are site-responsive, where our research is driven by the site. We’re commenting on the actual location, which can be reflected in the text and the kind of sounds that we use. We do a lot of research, but then the pieces have an intuitive aspect to them, too, so it’s not just showing the research.

There are pieces that we really make for a physical site. Because we’re here, now we make this. It could go anywhere, but we made it because we were in this place.

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?

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 databases. 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.

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.

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?

In the early days I think people thought that the internet is over here and society is somewhere else, and now we’re all very aware of how computing is all around us, in our pockets and in our lives, and we can’t always distinguish ourselves from our data bodies.

In the early days I think people thought that the internet is over here and society is somewhere else, and now we’re all very aware of how computing is all around us, in our pockets and in our lives, and we can’t always distinguish ourselves from our data bodies.

Keith Obadike

Some things, they became understandings for us about the way the world works and also the way our projects work. I don’t know that other people would look at it and say, “Oh yeah, that’s like coding.” But for us, those conversations are still continuing.

Maybe if there’s any parallel now to where we started with the work around 30 years ago, we’re teaching a class now on text scores and music, art, and performance [Sound, Music, and Public Space, the spring 2024 Urban Justice Lab]. In that class, as well as in our work, we’re thinking about how we’ve used language as a prompt, as a way to get images or performances or music, and the long history of that in the arts and how that connects us to this moment now, where we’re generating images from AI-driven platforms.

Particularly when we’re dealing with freedom songs or folk songs from the African American tradition, we think of these as a seed that has to be planted with us and that we have to then plant again.

Mendi Obadike

Could you describe your research process, your work in archives, and how that translates into the pieces you make?

A lot of our reason for going into the archive is to find things that we often call our ephemeral inheritances. They are things that are not tangible, or that we think of as not tangible that the archives point to, and often those things are music or sonic culture.

Particularly when we’re dealing with freedom songs or folk songs from the African American tradition, we think of these as a seed that has to be planted with us and that we have to then plant again. It’s from the past, but it needs our voice now, and then we need to re-perform those songs. Then we also want them to do something else — we want them to leave us and keep going. So the works respond to the archive, but the purpose of that is for it to come through this time and for us to think about what it gives us now, for us to engage other people with what we’ve learned or what we experienced from re-performing the song. Then, we try to make explicit that people can take something away.

In preparing for this conversation, this was the first time I was introduced to the term you coined, Mendi, of  “acousmatic Blackness.” Can you speak a bit about this idea and how you explore it through your work?

Acousmatic Black sound is a concept that I coined to think about what it means to experience a sound that you associate with Blackness that you don’t see the source of. In our work, I think a lot of times what we’re thinking about, especially when we’re working in public spaces, is giving people an acousmatic Black sound that is one that can be generative and welcoming. We did a project recently where our idea was to wrap a community in love.

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.

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.

I was actually interested in talking about that work, SlowDrag, 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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.”