This project was initially developed during my residency as Artist In Research at the Berwick Research Institute.

It is being published by ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art in Volume 16: Low-Tech.

Audio commentary by Wayne Marshall of wayneandwax.com and presently Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT.

Shrine to the Funky Drummer is an experimental video documentary that seeks to portray a specific instance of media sampling as an archetypal cultural moment and a lens through which to examine a multifaceted story of creative appropriation.  The ‘Funky Drummer’ is a five-second excerpt from a James Brown song that has been used as the foundation of hundreds of other musical compositions and is one of popular music’s most famous samples. For this project I gathered and created artifacts and ‘holy relics’ that explore the early history of Hip Hop and the creative acts of sampling and remixing. The video examines debates about copyright and fair use in relation to Afro-Diasporic musical notions of “versioning,” the fetishistic culture of record-digging, and postmodern theoretical questions about authorship in the age of digital (re)production.

Watch video

At present, there are thousands of webcams or networked security cameras that broadcast publicly over the Internet. A simple Google search reveals countless results for these types of cameras, including many that may not intended for public scrutiny but are catalogued nonetheless by search bots. The ceaseless flow of images from these autonomous cameras is typically ephemeral and unremarked, but provides fertile material for artistic investigation.

In my project I harvest these ambient video streams, using a telematic practice of ‘sampling’ the photographs from the virtual cameras, and transform them into video-music compositions and rhythmic micro-narratives. I meld the found images, which are often disassociated from any recognizable locality, into time-lapse videos, then use the minutiae of these tiny vignettes as a visual ‘score’ for which I compose a tightly-synchronized musical accompaniment. These videos provide a means of visualizing temporary and fleeting moments that are ordinarily invisible in our experience of everyday life. The resulting rhythms of change, textures of image, patterns of human movement, and qualities of light are mirrored by musical motifs that form an expressive, subtle portrait of the original spaces, of which the location remains unknown.

I’ve been chosen as an Artist In Research at the Berwick Research Institute for this spring.

Here’s what the press release says:

Update: My Berwick project blog can be found here if you’d like to follow along.

A collection of musical compositions created over the last year or so under my solo moniker Avocado Kid.

Each song can be thought of as a soundtrack to a distinct imaginary world. As most of them are quite brief, I conceive of them as miniature themes, conjuring the essential impression of a scene and story.

The instruments I play on these tracks include electric and upright bass, drum kit, guitars, electric piano and organ, violin, bamboo saxophone, trombone, synthesizers, drum machines, african and latin percussion, melodica, voice.

The Drastics Chicago Dub Massive

I learned the art of live dub mixing.

with

Anthony Abbinanti . Baritone Sax, Drums, Melodica, Percussion, Recording Engineer
Chris Merrill . Bass
Gary Palmer . Rhodes Piano, Organ
Tom Riley . Alto Saxophone
Ben Wagley . Drums
Bijan Warner . Guitar, Keyboards

Our album Premonition on JumpUp Records