Test Pattern 01: DeForrest Brown Jr. with madison moore and Alexander Weheliye

DeForrest Brown Jr. joins forces with VCU professor madison moore for Black Vibrations, a performance that considers the history of Detroit techno, and the potential of “vibrational technologies” as an instrument and a weapon. The performance will be followed by a conversation with scholar and philosopher Alexander Weheliye.

Can’t make it to the ICA? The entire event will be livestreamed HERE!

Test Pattern is a hybrid performance series that invites visiting artists to use the ICA auditorium as an experimental production studio, inspired by the legacy of public access TV and alternative video movements in the US.

During each week-long residency, the artists will collaborate with members of the local community, transforming the ICA auditorium into a space for music, movement, activism, and deep conversations. Each week will culminate in a live performance and broadcast.

Test Pattern presents the public with a unique window into the creative process, to observe rehearsals, participate in live tapings and online streams of the performances, and to later access each episode in its final form.

DeForrest Brown Jr. is an Alabama-raised, Ex-American rhythmanalyst, writer and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. He produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music. His work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music. He has lectured at Spotify for Artists: Co.Lab, Brown University, Yale University, and has written for Artforum, NPR, Mixmag, and Afropunk. He recently taught a studio course titled (alt) reality at Parsons School of Design | The New School with Jazsalyn Nachelle of black beyond. He was also the inaugural Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at Issue Project Room, and an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg Residency. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu, and Primary Information will soon publish his first book, Assembling a Black Counter-Culture.

madison moore, Ph.D. (American Studies, Yale), is an artist-scholar, DJ and assistant professor of Queer Studies in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. They are broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the face of rolling catastrophe. His first book Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), offers a cultural analysis of fabulousness as a practice of resistance. Other articles have been published in venues including The Atlantic, Theater, the Journal of Popular Music Studies and We Can Do Better Than This: 35 Voices on the Future of LGBTQ Rights (Penguin UK), edited by Amelia Abraham. madison has performed internationally at a range of nightclubs, parties and art institutions, including the Perth Festival, Performance Space Sydney, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, American Realness, Tate Britain, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. madison is currently writing a book titled Dance Mania: A Manifesto for Queer Nightlife. In Summer 2022, madison will be an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University where he teaches black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke UP, 2005), which was awarded The Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke UP, 2014). He is currently working on another book, Feenin: R&B’s Technologies of Humanity, which offers a critical history of the intimate relationship between R&B music and technology since the late 1970’s.