Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
Saturday 8 November 2003
Featuring five leading artists and theorists in the field of contemporary sample culture, this symposium will mix talks, discussions and performances to investigate the practice of sampling, an emerging form of art practice where artists cannibalize fragments of sound, image, music, dance and performance to create new spaces of possibility. Participants will include sound-artist and cultural collagist Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us), German art and music theorist Diedrich Diederichsen, cultural critic Kodwo Eshun, and artists Mark Leckey and Christian Marclay.
Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us) is a musician, sound-artist, video-maker and satirist, whose mixed-media manipulations deploy absurd moments to expose a surreal world of bad connections and faulty communications. Her dynamic cross-platform performances have taken place at the ICA London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and at festivals from Brooklyn to Barcelona.
Diedrich Diederichsen was the editor of German music magazines Sounds and Spex and is one of the most important critical voices internationally on art, music and pop culture. Professor at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart and at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, he is a frequent contributor to Artforum and Texte Zur Kunst. He has edited Yo! Hermeneutics: Black Cultural Criticism/Pop/Media/Feminism and Loving the Alien: Science Fiction, Diaspora, Multi-Culturalism.
Kodwo Eshun is a self-professed ‘concept engineer’, and known for his ‘fast-forward’ theories on electronic music and its interface with art, science fiction, technology and machine culture. His debut book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction was published in 1998, and his writings appear frequently in The Wire, The Face, i-D, Spin, Arena and The Guardian.
British artist, Mark Leckey, uses sampled sound, found film footage, video, and live performance to pit the innocence and irresponsibility of club culture against rich art historical references in an attempt to break open the traditional codes and modes of art practice. Leckey’s Big Box Statue Action was recently the inaugural performance in the Tate & Egg Live: free series, and his work has been featured in exhibitions in London at the ICA, Tate Modern, Cabinet, and the Barbican Centre and at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York and Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne.
Influential New York artist Christian Marclay has produced one of the most important bodies of work about sound and its role in contemporary culture. Legendary DJ, composer, collagist, and sculptor, Marclay creates new narratives on the threshold between the audible and the visible. His first retrospective was held at the UCLA Hammer Museum in 2003, and he has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Kunsthaus Zurich, White Cube and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Since the advent of collage in the early twentieth century artists have sought to reprocess cultural residue from the past to create new systems of representation. Whereas much of the discourse around sampling still relies on theories of appropriation developed twenty years ago, sampling can be distinguished as a distinct aesthetic strategy, and one more relevant to many cultural practices today. Sampling both quotes and challenges notions of authorship, originality, and intellectual property, while creating new narratives and new ways of reactivating the archive of art, and representing the everyday.
Secure booking at www.tate.org.uk/tickets or 020 7887 8888