The Wind From Nowhere, (video still, 2016)
Blog

Appendix 003


08 May 2020

Our new Appendix feature unpacks references, influences and themes of the week’s online programme and announcements. A Saturday digest of sound, video and written content from across the internet; Appendix is a digital reading, watching and listening list for the extra-curious.

i.) Read: Fifty Years Later, Black Panthers' Art Still Resonates (via New York Times): An interview with Emory Douglas, The Black Panther Party minister of culture, whose vision guided the party's imagery. Juliana Huxtable, who began a month-long online residency with Somerset House Studios this week, incldued Douglas' work in a selection of influential works for our blog.

   

"Never sacrificing nuance or beauty for political urgency, Emory Douglas has long been a key influence in my visual work."

Juliana Huxtable

ii.) Listen: Joanne Armitage on Feminist Algorave (via Hacking Culture): Matthew Tift talks with Dr. Joanne Armitage, discussing feminist algorave, her live coding workshops for women and non-binary people, narratives around failure, inclusion and diversity in technology communities, and more. Joanne kicked off Mutant Promise's online workshop programme for Somerset House Studios this week with an introduction to making music with live coding in SuperCollider.

Mutant Promise is a new programming and producing platform supporting the work of musicians who combine a DIY and workshop practice with their performance, composition and release work.

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Joanne Armitage performs at Nano MUTEK Buenos Aires. Photo: Malu Campello

iii.) Read: Charting the Evolution of Post-Internet Music (via Red Bull): Adam Harper tracks underground music's shifting response to our increasingly digital lives over the past decade. Programming and producing platform Mutant Promise takes its name from Harper's piece, in a passage describing a particular modern faction of grime "fulfilling a mutant promise" beyond the futurism of classic London grime. Founders Tadeo Sendon-Lopez and Harry Murdoch take Harper's wording and attribute it with new meaning; for their new DIY music platform, 'mutant promise' becomes the encapsulation of a desire to work with artists who are restless with their medium, whose practice is to continually hack, modify, invent - mutate - the tools and instruments which they're given. The 'promise' is the certainty of the push forward that defines these tools, and how this process shapes new artistic practices in return.

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Tracking the evolution of post-internet music © SANTA FRANCE


iii.) Read: Learning from the Virus (via Artforum): Writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado's essay on the political disease management of Covid-19. Another of Juliana Huxtable's influences, Preciado's book Testo Junkie is cited by Huxtable as "the single most illuminating, paradigm-shifting and totalizing take on the evolution of power, capital and their permutations of the past 10+ years."

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Nurses in a Covid-19 quarantine unit, Baghdad Medical City, April 8, 2020. Photo: Murtaja Lateef/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock.
 
iv.) Listen: 'STAMINA' by RRP aka Tanora, whose music featured as part of Tarek Lakhrissi's TRANSMISSIONS episode, Your world is already ending, which broadcasted live via the Somerset House website this week.  

v.) Read/Watch: Studios resident Seth Pimlott makes experimental narrative films that he develops through a workshop process. The workshops themselves involve creatively engaging with the concerns of the individual or group he works with, and place faith in the power of the imagination to master one’s own narrative. Working with a mix of amateurs and professionals, this collective spirit of making results in films that are more than the sum of their parts, creating a community for which the film is meaningful, to which the film belongs, and that it represents.

For this week's PAUSE - a mid-week moment to take in an artists' work online in full - we featured Seth's work Alone Together, a film inviting the audience to imagine the body as the dynamic centre of all change, a strange ally on our journey through life. Alone Together was made through workshops with Whitechapel Gallery's youth forum, Duchamp & Sons - you can trace the development of the project through the young people's documentation of the project here. Also check out Seth's work made as part of Gasworks' Participation Artist Residency 2016-18, in which he produced two films in collaboration with organisations from Polish and Latin American communities in South London.    

Header image: Seth Pimlott, 'The Wind from Nowhere' (video still, 2016)