A cursory glance at the history of techno music suggests paradoxes. The product of an intersection of factors and influences resolutely local to a certain time in the urban American Midwest, it soon found a passionate audience halfway around the world, in West Berlin. Embedded in black, working and middle class experience, it became an expression of revolutionary hope and optimism. In Black to Techno, Jenn Nkiru explores the origins and impact of the radical musical movement that originated in Detroit in precisely this complexity.
Commissioned as part of the Frieze x Gucci ‘Second Summer of Love’ series, Nkiru likens the film’s spiky collage of intersecting narratives and conceptual frameworks, archival references and original imagery, to someone flipping between public access TV stations, or a VHS tape filled with traces of different recordings. With this diversity, Black to Techno’s excavates and explores the unique and total nature of the circumstances that birthed techno: touching on everything from Detroit’s heritage as the home of Fordist automation and the rhythm of the production line, to the influence of the Motown artists, and the city’s groundbreaking icon, Aretha Franklin. Equally alive to the deep history of the African-American Great Migration and to the particular emergence of specific acoustic technologies in the period (and the economic structures that governed access to them), the film offers not a simple origin story of techno but rather a ‘cosmic archaeology’, in the artist’s words.
The archaeology unearths many findings, but chief among them is an idea of techno as a model for the overcoming of alienation, the undoing of oppositions: between the individual and the means of production, body and tool, soul and machine. ‘Techno wasn’t designed to be a sound’, as DJ Jeff Mills once said, ‘It was designed to be a futurist statement’.
Jenn Nkiru’s Black to Techno screens alongside the first three films in the ‘Second Summer of Love’ series at Frieze Los Angeles in the Paramount Theater on Sunday, February 17th at 3:30—6:00pm
For more, head to Gucci.com
Main image: Jenn Nkiru, Black to Techno, 2019. Film still. © the artist
粗略地浏览一下技术音乐的历史，就会发现一些悖论。由于各种因素和影响的交集，在美国中西部城市的某个特定时间内，它很快在世界各地的西柏林找到了热情的听众。在黑人、工人和中产阶级的经验中，它成为了革命希望和乐观主义的一种表达。在《从黑人到技术》中，Jenn Nkiru探讨了起源于底特律的激进音乐运动的起源和影响，正是这种复杂性。作为《爱的第二个夏天》系列的一部分，Nkiru将这部电影中贯穿叙事和概念框架、档案参考和原始图像的尖峰拼贴画比喻为在公共接入电视台之间翻来覆去的人，或是装满不同录音痕迹的VHS磁带。通过这种多样性，Black to Techno挖掘并探索了诞生Techno的环境的独特性和整体性：从底特律作为福特汽车自动化的发源地的传统到生产线的节奏，再到汽车城艺术家的影响，再到城市的开创性图标Aretha Franklin。.同样地，这部电影还生动地展示了非洲裔美国人大迁徙的深厚历史，以及在这一时期特定声学技术的出现（以及支配这些技术的经济结构），用艺术家的话说，它不是一个简单的技术起源故事，而是一个“宇宙考古学”。
考古学发现了许多发现，但其中最主要的是一种将技术作为克服异化、消除对立的模型的想法：个人和生产手段、身体和工具、灵魂和机器之间。“技术不是一种声音”，正如DJ Jeff Mills曾经说的，“它不是一种声音”。被设计成未来派的宣言。 Jenn Nkiru的黑到技术屏幕，以及2月17日星期日下午3:30-6:00在洛杉矶派拉蒙剧院举行的“第二个爱的夏天”系列的前三部电影，更多内容请访问gucci.com主图像：Jenn Nkiru，Black to Techno，2019。电影静止。礼貌：艺术家赞助的内容/第二个夏天的爱古奇弗里泽洛杉矶技术音乐柏林底特律珍恩基鲁
FRIZE特稿 ARThing编译
