Tanner Talk with Louis Chude-Sokei

Louis Chude-Sokei is a writer and scholar who is currently Professor of English and Director of the African American and Black Diaspora Studies Program at Boston University where he holds the George and Joyce Wein Chair. His books include the award-winning, The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2005), The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015) and the acclaimed memoir, Floating in A Most Peculiar Way (2021). His work has appeared in numerous languages, including the German publication, Race Und Technologie: Essays Der Migration (2023) and the Korean translation of, Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber: Reggae, Technology and the Diaspora Process (2022). He is Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar, one of the oldest and leading journals of Black Studies in the United States.

Chude-Sokei also has a significant profile in the arts. He has collaborated with numerous artists and performers, including iconic Berlin electronic artists, Mouse on Mars with whom he produced the celebrated album Anarchic Artificial Intelligence (2021). The legendary Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company adapted his work for their 2023-2024 touring show, Curriculum II. He has also collaborated with renowned figures such as influential guitarist and writer, David Grubbs, and noted artist/composers like Marina Rosenfeld, Jan St. Werner, Dimitris Papadatos (Jay Glass Dubs), Yara Mekawei and the highly regarded artist duo, Mendi&Keith Obadike.

Chude-Sokei is founder of the international sonic art/archiving project, Echolocution, and was lead artist/curator of “Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention,” a sound art/sonic archiving project which won the prestigious Kulturstiftung Des Bundes Award from the German Federal Cultural Foundation in 2020. The album of sound recordings and installations from that project was released in 2024. He was a curator of Carnegie Hall’s 2022 Afrofuturism Festival and is currently an advisor to the Guggenheim Museum’s Art and Technology Initiative in partnership with LG Electronics. His work was central to the official German Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, where he also contributed a sound installation entitled “Thresholds,” which lent its title to the Pavilion itself.

His forthcoming book is Machines of Flesh and Blood: Race and the Making of Artificial Intelligence (Viking/Random House, 2026).

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