Mendi + Keith Obadike
Artist Talk on occasion of their exhibition The Skeuomorph opening at Gallery QI
April 3, 2025
5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Gallery QI, Atkinson Hall Auditorium, UC San Diego
Rooted in African-American freedom struggles and Igbo cosmology, The Skeuomorph unfolds as a poetic meditation on technological agency and the myths we encode in our machines. At the center of the exhibition stands BLKBX (BB)—a sculptural object, a "smarter" speaker and a speculative AI entity trained on documents of African American and African Diasporic histories, biographies and philosophies of freedom. Through a multisensory installation featuring reimagined political speeches, archival fragments, and layered sonic environments, the exhibition invites visitors to consider how history reverberates in the present—shaping the voices we amplify, the ones we silence, and the futures we imagine.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Visual Arts Visiting Speaker Series, this event includes panel discussion with Louis Chude-Sokei, Professor and George and Joyce Wein Chair of English and Director of the African American and Black Diaspora Studies Program at Boston University; in addition to recently publishing The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015), Chude-Sokei collaborated with Berlin based electronic artists Mouse on Mars, with whom he produced the album Anarchic Artificial Intelligence (2021). Event moderated by Amy Alexander, Professor of Visual Arts and Gallery QI committee co-chair and Robert Twomey, Assistant Teaching Professor of Visual Arts and Committee Member of the Department of Visual Arts Visiting Speaker Series. Chude-Sokei and Mendi Obadike will participate via Zoom.
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 works were pioneering pieces for the Internet. Many of these early internet works were experiments in form and explorations of Mendi + Keith’s concept of “social filters”. They define a social filter as a mechanism that allows or denies access to specific identities in physical or digital spaces. Since making these early digital works they have exhibited and performed at The New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Their 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.
Keith received a BA in Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. He is a professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University. Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College and a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. She is a professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Mendi and Keith serve on the boards of Rhizome and The Vera List Center for Art and Politics.