The Third Part of The Third Measure, The Otolith Group
Project Space, Fine Art Building, University of Leeds, 17–26 February 2022

In February 2022 The Project Space in the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies hosted the extraordinary sounds and images of The Otolith Group’s Third Part of the Third Measure (2017). Visitors were invited to have a conversation with the wonderful student invigilators about this powerful installation featuring the words and compositions of Julius Eastman (1940-90).

The Third Part of the Third Measure (2017) is a work by The Otolith Group that creates an encounter with the militant minimalism of avant-garde composer, pianist and vocalist Julius Eastman. The video installation focuses on what The Otolith Group describe as ‘an experience of watching in the key of listening’, invoking political feelings of defiance and the collective practice of movement building that participates in the global struggles against neoreactionary authoritarianism. The Third Part of the Third Measure invites viewers to attend to exemplary ecstatic aesthetics of black radicalism that Eastman himself once described as ‘full of honour, integrity and boundless courage’.

Founded by Anjali Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, The Otolith Group creates films, installations, audioworks and performances informed by methods drawn from the cognitive estrangement generated by science fiction. Their film and video works incorporate post lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human and the anti-human.

Tunings of the World, a Sadler Seminar Series 2021–22

The project this seminar contributes to and develops is one whose constitutive inter-disciplinarity is designed to open this conversation to many. At the same time, it reminds us all that attuning to a discipline often involves listening to what it only struggles to give voice to.