Alexander Provan
Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan are joined by Derica Shields, a writer, researcher, and cultural worker living in London. She speaks about her book-length oral history of Black experiences of the welfare state, “A Heavy Nonpresence,” and the value of listening to Black peoples’ accounts and analyses of their own lives. Shields reflects on her effort to share the stories of Black people who are mistreated and monitored by the state, while also being made to feel that they should be grateful for receiving the assistance to which they’re entitled. Her work shows how, in Britain, liberal nostalgia for the ...
Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan are joined by Tashi Wada, a Los Angeles-based composer and performer. Wada presents Table of Visions, a composition for a “high-resolution player piano” commissioned by Triple Canopy, and asks how we discern between human expression and technical perfection, how we listen to virtuosos and machines. With Gale and Provan, Wada discusses the pandemic-era vogue for liveness at home, technologies that claim to capture the souls of performers, and music that prompts listeners to discern between the sounds of machines and humans. They listen to Conlon Nancarrow, Glenn Gould, Perry Como, advertisements for hi-fi systems, the ...
On this special episode of Hidden Noise, we are presenting you with recordings from Digital de Suite, a symposium on blockchain and the arts held during Frieze New York in May 2018.
Part 1
We begin with an introduction by Even’s editor Jason Farago, who spoke to the live audience about why a print magazine would care about blockchain.
Then artist Sarah Meyohas discusses her Bitchcoin project and subsequent use of blockchain technologies in her practice. And finally, we present a panel discussion with artists Sarah Meyohas and Artie Vierkant, alongside Hugo Liu from Artsy and Kevin McCoy from Monegraph, moderated by Triple ...
Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan are joined by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, an artist, composer, and performer living in New York City. He speaks about bass as a way to repulse people or bring them together, cause aggravation or collective pleasure. He recounts moments in his life when bass, emanating from a parked car or carnival, has shaken his walls, tested his nerves, and made him feel connected to other people, whether or not he appreciates the music blasting from their subwoofers. Ranging from the soundtrack of his childhood in Baton Rouge to the sonic maelstrom of J’ouvert in Brooklyn, Toussaint-Baptiste describes ...
“The more lonesome the isolation, the easier the pitch.” An essay on the exchange of faces for interfaces, suits for sweats, presence for liveness, and freedom for safety; a note on Two Ears and One Mouth. With artworks by Graham Anderson. (This essay is also available as an audio recording.)
Headless, an exhilarating murder-mystery by the elusive K. D., probes the sordid secrets and sinister deeds of powerful financiers who use Caribbean firms to conceal their fortunes. The novel begins with workaday author John Barlow agreeing to ghostwrite a novel about secretive tax havens. Barlow assumes the job will be a no-brainer. But then his eccentric employers, Swedish conceptualist artist duo Goldin+Senneby, ask him to investigate Headless Ltd., a shadowy company with possible links to the French philosopher Georges Bataille, known for his obsession with human sacrifice. Barlow travels to Nassau, Bahamas, the glitzy mecca of offshore finance, and begins ...
Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan are joined by Harmony Holiday, a writer, archivist, and dancer who lives in Los Angeles. Holiday, whose essay “The Black Catatonic Scream” was published by Triple Canopy last year, speaks about Black performers whose songs and struggles reflect the ongoing trauma of the “African holocaust.” She links the history of Black music—and instances of performers becoming silent or speechless—to the legacy of enslavement and segregation, when Black people “were smiling and dancing to not get killed.” With Gale and Provan, she discusses the pressure to pander to white audiences as well as the impulse to ...
“Lord, have you nothing pretty from China about you? Something that one does not know what to do with?” A video and script that tell of Chinese characters conjured by a New England industrialist to manufacture superior ceramics for the glory of the nation (and amusement of the local Orientalists).
In “International Art English,” Alix Rule and David Levine describe the language of contemporary art by analyzing a corpus of press releases sent by e-flux, which is paid to do so by museums, biennials, publishers, and art fairs in order to reach a subscriber base of more than ninety thousand art professionals. The essay appeared in 2012 and soon surpassed the popularity of every other Triple Canopy publication. “International Art English” generated innumerable conversations about the relationship between language, legibility, and power in the art world: columns in the Guardian, polemics in e-flux’s online journal, debates at conferences for art ...
Nikita Gale, an artist living in Los Angeles and the co-host of Medium Rotation, speaks with Alexander Provan about the forces that shape what we listen to and with whom, and how the segregation of cities has been bolstered on the airwaves. They discuss the trajectory from “race records” to so-called Urban songs, and the role of the music industry in determining whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced. The conversation is followed by a reading of “Little Girls,” Gale’s Triple Canopy essay on Tina Turner, Phil Spector. The essay considers “the sound of being together—or of being packed ...
Medium Rotation presents conversations and sonic experiences that probe the conditions (and counter the received ideas) of our time, among other times. Each season of the podcast is animated by the concerns of an issue of the magazine, which are addressed by artists, writers, and scholars. The first season, Omniaudience, asks how we understand ourselves and others through listening—and what the obstacles to listening reveal about our society. Omniaudience also testifies to the power we exercise as listeners to act in concert with each other, and to amplify voices that might not otherwise be heard.
Prompted by the 2011 Egyptian uprising, this book-length essay on the cultural politics of sleep by writer and editor Anna Della Subin takes as its starting point Tawfiq al-Hakim’s 1933 play The People of the Cave. Based on the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which also appears in the Qur’an, the play tells the story of three Christian men and a dog who awaken in a cave after fleeing from persecution by their pagan king. Upon venturing out, the men discover that three hundred years have passed, and must come to terms with a transformed world. Though hailed ...
