The Experiment: Pt. 1
Amiri Baraka Fred Moten Wadada Leo Smith Sonia Sanchez
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
What happens when you are engaged in a deep and extended artistic practice that intersects between literature and music, notation and improvisation, sight and sound?
Ian and Gil will host a discussion on the Argument project’s social and political commentaries, and with you try and maybe think through whether and how they might still have some currency today: what’s changed and what’s stayed the same?
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.
As opposed to suggesting soundtrack’s to Brakhage’s works [which are almost entirely silent] Text of Light use his works to stimulate improvisation, enveloping them into the structure of the group much like an additional musician.
A series of badly felted lock-ups and garages + multiple locations within the Megastructure – a purpose built town centre in one building, comprising (in the 50’s at least) of housing (never occupied), shops, apartments, a hotel, ice rink, police station and other amenities
A spectacular musical show which discusses the representation of a nation state, its characters and history. A learning play on myth construction and its reproduction.
Sachiko’s very simple, pure sine tones and structures. Otomo on double pianos. Filament’s music isn’t composed and it isn’t improvised: it’s a hybrid of the two.
A performative survey of listening, as we managed to find it being used as a tool in different practices, disciplines and communities in North America (music, poetry, film, philosophy, activism…).
Percussion used to explore the social construction of space
Harrowing but musical confrontations with the very real, physical and aural trauma of a woman screaming.
A mixture of investigation groups, live performances, screenings and installations at DCA; the festival looked to strip back music, sound, film and moving image to their core ideas and explore them with artists and audiences.
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.