CARL CRAIG SESSIONS
Dia Art Foundation with Electronic Arts Intermix and the Hammer Museum
Summer 2020

The Carl Craig Sessions gives voice to an ongoing and multivocal dialogue about techno’s emergence in

Detroit’s underground as well as its reverberations worldwide.

Originating in post-Fordist Detroit in the early 1980s, techno arose not only as an electronic music form,

but also as an aesthetic and political movement committed to experimentation, counter-histories, and

imagined futures. As artist and sound theorist Kodwo Eshun stated in 1995: “Detroit techno took music

beyond the dance, into the chaos of electronics; inventing a history and a future, a direction and an ideal as

successful as that other 1980s neologism, cyberspace.”

Inviting artists, DJs, musicians, writers, and thinkers, the Carl Craig Sessions consider the sonic influence of

techno. Devoting primary attention to archives of Black experience, the sessions also consider how techno

challenges the racial capitalist relationship between human and machine to articulate visions of a

transformative society.

Part I, with Tony Cokes and Otolith Group, constellates some of the forms, mythologies, and politics

present in the greater movement of techno.

Part II, featuring Ulysses Jenkins and Cauleen Smith, offers enigmatic visions of current and future

metropolises and the slippages between them. Spatiotemporal loopholes weave fantasy into images of the

already postapocalyptic - from the industrial landscape to the extraterrestria - redefining our relationship to

the conditions of the present.

Part III features cinematic excavations of techno and the sonic Black Atlantic - Paul Gilroy’s notion of a

circulatory, transnational diasporic culture - by Tony Cokes and Jenn Nkiru. Working in distinct styles that

reveal the expansiveness of the techno aesthetic, Cokes and Nkiru trace transatlantic currents of sound and

gesture, technologies that are equally mediums for the inscription of history as they are channels for

envisioning alternative futures. The sample culture of techno finds cinematic analogues in the montage and

the flicker, exposing a cross-pollination of the cinematic and the sonic within the broader ecosystem from

which the techno movement emerged.

Co-organized with Devin Malone.