Tony Cokes

Mikrohaus, or the black atlantic?, 2006 – 2008

Dia Art Foundation, New York

Streaming Thursday August 6, 12 pm (EST) – Sunday, August 9, 9 pm (EST)

In conjunction with Carl Craig’s Party/After-Party (2020) at Dia Beacon, Dia presents a cumulative platform of public programs exploring the legacy of techno through summer 2021. The Carl Craig Sessions join an ongoing and multivocal dialogue about techno’s emergence in Detroit’s underground as well as its reverberations worldwide.

The third and final screening in the Carl Craig Sessions film program 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.

Tony Cokes, Mikrohaus, or the black atlantic?, 2006-08
Jenn Nkiru, REBIRTH IS NECESSARY, 2017
Jenn Nkiru, BLACK TO TECHNO, 2019

For more information, please visit the Dia Art Foundation website.