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.
Originating in post-Fordist Detroit in the early 1980s, techno arose not only as an electronic music form, but also as an aesthetic and political movement committed to experimentation, counter-histories, and imagined futures. As artist and sound theorist Kodwo Eshun stated in 1995: “Detroit techno took music beyond the dance, into the chaos of electronics; inventing a history and a future, a direction and an ideal as successful as that other 1980s neologism, cyberspace.”
Inviting artists, DJs, musicians, writers, and thinkers, the Carl Craig Sessions consider the sonic influence of techno. Devoting primary attention to archives of Black experience, the sessions also consider how techno challenges the racial capitalist relationship between human and machine to articulate visions of a transformative society.
Screening I
June 25–28, 2020
Thursday, June 25, 5 pm
Launch event with a live conversation between Carl Craig, sound theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr., and Dia curator Kelly Kivland
Register for the conversation here.
Tony Cokes, Black Celebration, 1988
Co-presentation with the Hammer Museum
Otolith Group, Hydra Decapita, 2010
Techno City: What is Detroit Techno?, 2000
