Sound: The Pink of Stealth (quicktime audio)
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Mendi & Keith Obadike
(O-bah-DEE-kay) are interdisciplinary artists whose music, live art,
and conceptual Internet artworks have been exhibited internationally.Their
album The Sour Thunder was recently released on Bridge Records. Their
writing and art projects have been featured in the film Take These
Chains, in periodicals (including Art Journal, Artthrob, Meridians,
Black Arts Quarterly, and Tema Celeste), and in the anthology Sound
Unbound:Sampling Digital Arts and Culture (MIT Press, edited by Paul
D. Miller). Their work generated much discussion online and offline
when they offered Keith's blackness for sale on eBay in 2001. In 2002
Mendi+Keith premiered their Internet opera The Sour Thunder which
was the first new media work commissioned by the Yale Cabaret and
they launched The Interaction of Coloreds (commissioned by the Whitney
Museum of American Art). In 2003 Keith was sound designer and composer
for Anna Deavere Smith's play Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 at the Lincoln
Center Institute, and Mendi's poetry was featured at the Studio Museum
in Harlem in response to an exhibition of visual artist Gary Simmons'
work. Also in 2003 they launched The Pink of Stealth, an Internet/
DVD surround sound work commissioned by the New York African Film
Festival and Electronic Arts Intermix and The Sour Thunder was broadcast
internationally from 104.1 fm in Berlin. Their upcoming projects include
a new installation and album entitled TaRonda Who Wore White Gloves
supported by a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship and an Internet opera
entitled Four Electric Ghosts, for Toni Morrison?s Atelier at Princeton
University in 2005. Most recently, Keith was awarded a Connecticut
Critics' Circle Award for his sound design work at the Yale Repertory
Theater and Mendi's new book Armor and Flesh (Lotus Press) won the
Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Keith received a BA in Art from North
Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University's
School of Drama and Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College
and is presently completing a PhD in the Literature Program at Duke
University. Black Net Art http://blacknetart.com |
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