IT’S NORMAL FOR SOME THINGS TO COME TO YOUR ATTENTION

A LIVE CINEMA / LIVE AUDIO PERFORMANCE BY NEGATIVLAND & SUE-C

We're hearing voices, but who’s doing the singing? Is that a phone or is it your nervous system?

In today’s media climate, it’s harder than ever to resist a voice designed to make you think it’s your own.

Live cinema visual artist SUE-C and legendary sound collage group Negativland collaborate in a live audio-visual performance about our minds, the world we live in, and the evolving forms of media and technology that orchestrate our perceptions.

2021 Tour / Edited and mixed by Ryan Worsley

“An urgent show by Negativland and artist SUE-C calls time on a tech dystopia that is as malevolent as it is stupid… to meet the terrifying contemporary moment… as the world slides incrementally into meltdown.”

— The Wire Magazine

photos by @lisahagenglynn @hardly_raining @hardlyraining
  • “Negativland have made a rewarding career out of being prodigious consumers of media who then digest it and recontextualize it, emphasizing mediated reality's crazy-making absurdity and the infinite malleability of perception and ‘truth.’”
    - Dave Segal, The Stranger

    "Negativland are proud subverters of culture, causing trouble while having fun."
    - NPR Tiny Desk Concert

    Since 1980, the multimedia collective known as Negativland have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sounds, images, objects, and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland re-arrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and "culture jamming" (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement. Their art and media interventions pose both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, technology, control, ownership, propaganda, power, and perception in the United States of America. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about and cited in over 150 books and legal journals, and they sometimes lecture about their work here and in Europe.

  • Sue Slagle (stage name SUE-C) is a video and light artist working at the intersection of creative coding and live performance. For the past 18 years, she has created handmade videos and live media performances, traveling extensively in Europe and the US. Her works challenge the norms of photography, video, and technology by blending them all into an organic and improvisational live performance setting. Employing a variety of digital tools to create an experimental animation “instrument,” she synthesizes cinema from photographs, drawings, watercolors, handmade papers, fabrics and miniature lighting effects.