Black Power Station 2018
The Black Power Station is a digital audiobook archive and mobile sound installation. The collaborative project works with US archives and archivists to produce digital and physical collection of audiobooks from authors of African descent that were published before 1923 but have fallen out of print.
The proposed project is titled The Black Power Station and it is a digital audiobook archive and mobile sound installation. Working mobile and working small is a growing interest in my work and thinking about mobility, place, and space, are a part of a growing body of projects that are a part of a practice of Black geography. For the Givens Artists in Residence Program, I am proposing to create a mobile listening station comprised of audiobooks and sound works. To do this I will collaborate with others who want to act as readers and make a small unobstrctive recording box that can be used in to make the recordings. Together we will work as artist-readers to identify and record, as spoken-texts, literature written by writers of African descent that have fallen out of print. Like many people, we habitually listen to audiobooks and podcasts and are a part of the growing community of listeners who have popularized the online audiobook service Audible. We have worked with archival materials in past projects, and a part of this interest in archives we have thought deeply about documentarian practices and the reanimation of those materials. This project uses the process of sonification, making text into sound, and in some cases using radio documentary methods to make materials that are difficult to access available for larger public use. The Black Power Station will exist as both a physical space, inside a mobile art space so that it may travel as a part of an ongoing mobile artist residency project, and it will also exist online.
Physical Installation : A Mobile Listening Station
