MM 3 Year: Ryan Clarke

Saturday December 23rd 4pm

a blackbird’s eye impressed on cane stalk, 2nd pass

A tonal geologist from the Northern Gulf Coast, Ryan Christopher Clarke notices the passage of time as both a trained sedimentologist and artist-researcher as co-editor at dweller electronics, a group dedicated towards providing black counterpoint within an otherwise eurologically dominant music industry. His works have been included in Rhizome, Frieze Art Fair Los Angeles, Arena Annual, Terraforma Journal, Louisiana State University Digital Commons, Boiler Room Festival New York, and YesWeCannibal. He is a member of the American Geosciences Union, a co-recipient of the Allied Media Critical Minded Grant, and is currently studying Ethnomusicology at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA investigating local cultural objects and their metaphysical communications.

Knowing intimately the ways his home is at great risk of physical and social erasure, he finds ways to not only document this loss quantitatively in scientific research, but qualitatively with works that try to articulate the knowledges his people share with the Mississippi Delta and its distributaries. Through the lenses of Jazz, New Orleans Bounce, Detroit Techno, Chicago House, and the physical geologies lying underneath each, he views the progression of technology and culture at-large as downstream of Black innovation in dialogue with their surrounding environment under the theory, “Southern Electronics”.