Library Transmission: Contemplative Dialogue 3

When we listen to musicians, composers, and producers speak about the music that has informed their thinking, past and present, we hear insights into their sonic ways of knowing the world. 

 More than aesthetic reference points, these insights reveal listening as a method, as tonal coordinates, as a situated, embodied, critically informed genesis of thought. What we hear are genealogies of ideas in sound, musical itineraries that shape the ways in which artists navigate history, politics, memory and relation. 

Contemplative Dialogues engages with these genealogies as sites of inquiry. It attends to the ways in which acoustic epistemologies attune contemporary practice. It treats listening as analytic, speculative, and world-making. 

Contemplative Dialogue 3 turns to the artist Tony Cokes. Since the late 1980s, Tony Cokes has developed an utterly singular audiovisual aesthetic in which texts selected from media theory, cultural studies, music journalism and African American history swipe across supervivid, ultraflat fields of monochrome driven by soundtracks ranging from postpunk and indie to techno and house.  

By divorcing text from images and mismatching fonts with beats, bass and voice, each Tony Cokes video, with their file format titles, brings us face to face with the associative, arbitrary and confounding, logics of sense, meaning and experience. Each video cross-wires the relations between listening, reading looking and watching to enact the ways in which, in his own words ‘music and text operate together to produce thought and affect.’ 

Upon watching his videos, it soon becomes clear that Cokes is a long-time fan of white British musics of the 1960s onwards. Join Tony Cokes and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Collective for a conversation that continues their ongoing dialogue on the use and abuse of white music for art made by artists of colour.  

A Contemplative Dialogue on white British music as archive and proposition: as a terrain of affective intensity, conceptual inquiry and ongoing political and aesthetic resonance.  

Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Doors open at 3.30pm; event starts at 4pm and finishes at 6pm.

Image credit: Tony Cokes, Installation view, Testament E: MF.slow.cancel.2014, Batalha Centro de Cinema, Porto, Portugal, 2024–25. Photo: Neva Films/Batalha Centro de Cinema