Digital Disco feat. 1 hour and 30 minutes of disco beats!
Date: Summer 2020
Medium: Zoom, audio mixing, Black diasporic music production, Black joy, digital collage
Disco is a historically Black and queer music genre that sits at the intersection of Black diasporic music production and advancement in technology. Given our material conditions, Black people have always been both culturally and politically innovative. Art is necessary to the heart of any revolution. I made this disco mix and accompanying zoom backgrounds as part of a digital event I co-hosted with Eliza Gonring on July 18th, 2020, called "A Night of Art and Disco." Through the event we sought to hold space to think about and celebrate the intersection of Black art, Black joy, technology, and liberation.
The first half of the night featured a digital art piece titled WORLDBUILD WITH ME and the second half was a digital disco featuring mixes by Eliza and myself.
Zoom Background Reflections
Our Disco was truly magical, the power disco has to transport us beyond our current reality is truly amazing. Disco is the intersection of Black diasporic music production and technological advancement, it's a queer and Black genre, it's full of escapist ideals, and for us on Saturday July 18, 2020 it brought a great deal of joy.
The first of three zoom backgrounds I made for our digital disco features a disco in space! I wanted folx to feel like they were in crowded futuristic discotheque while they danced. The planet sized disco ball grounds the dancers so that they aren't floating around aimlessly in space, and the UFOs (taken from the cover of Parliament's funk filled album Mothership Connection) tie the piece together as the intersection of afrofuturistism, tech based Black music genres, and the expression of Black joy through dance. Also, how cool is it to imagine dancing in space!! What would it be like to boogie in zero gravity liberated from Earth's gravity AND white supremacy (which hopefully wouldn't follow us into space).
The second of three zoom backgrounds I made for the digital disco features a monster sunflower destroying a post-apocalyptic version of Chicago's loop while two Black folx dance on the top of a building nearby, and a giant disco ball hangs in the sky above. To me this piece emulates the wrath of mother nature - she's taking back the earth for herself as humans have been deemed unable to reverse the harm they have enacted on the land and she has to take matters into her own hands. Further, the atrocities that the city of Chicago has enacted on Black folx, indigenous folx and folx of color in the downtown area are numerous and thus in solidarity with said folx (who have also been adversely affected by the environmental crisis), the flower in an act of solidarity is destroying the loop alongside a moment of Black joy. I see these two acts of liberatory power (the display of Black joy, and the taking back of the land) as monumentally disrupting the oppressive state together. Having this photo be the background for folx while dancing to disco music, to me, is a beautiful afrofuturistic performance of joy and liberation.
This third zoom backgrounds I made for our digital disco features a clip from Slyvesters music video to "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" on top of a clip of blurry green vegetation and light! Eliza and I both love the idea of having a disco outside, surrounded by nature, with the stars above us in the sky, and I wanted to blend the disco with nature in this last background. I did this with the digital disco flyer as well putting a disco ball over this same blurry green video file calling on viewers to imagine a disco ball hanging from a green canopy filled with light instead of the ceiling of a club. Eliza and I hope to manifest one day having a disco surrounded by plants, under the night sky, by bringing them together in this visual :)