Recently, EMERGE has been on an arts kick. It all started back in late May when we took a trip to Berlin, Munich and Paris. While in Paris, we caught up with our friend Sean Dack, a brilliant conceptual video artist and photographer, with a likeminded penchant for late nights and electronic music. After checking out an opening by an artist he works with at the presitigious Air De Paris gallery, Dack took EMERGE out to dinner with the artist Sarah Morris, the folks from M/M Paris and a bunch of other French art-world luminaries. Before we left to do a hilariously organized  dj gig at Le Baron, he introduced me to one of the most fascinating people I've ever met. Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator, writer, and director of the Serpentine Gallery in London. He's also consented to a rare q&a with EMERGE so to thank Sean for the introduction, we'd like to call attention to his latest creative endeavor: Future Songs.

The project pairs Dack's conceptual rigor and deep love for pop culture with the somewhat unhinged "predictions" for the future by acclaimed science fiction author Phillip K Dick. Composed as a book, downloadable from the internet, or purchasable from Dack's New York gallerist, Daniel Reich, Future Sounds takes texts from Dick's predictions- written in 1981- and pairs one for each year from 1983-2000 with the sheet music for the corresponding Number One single for that period. To find out which song  is which requires either an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music or the ability to play from sheet music.

It's a pretty interesting collision of two very disparate world views, the pop and the paranoid, and it's also interesting to see how the significance of the pop songs is coded through it's presentation as sheet music with the lyrics replaced by some oddly prescient visions for the future. Ironically, these prescient predictions are also coded in so far as they have to be separated from the more outlandish ideas involving Soviet aggression and alien viruses.

Completing the project is a brief text penned by Dack's mentor and Turner Prize nominee Liam Gillick who gleefully conflates Dack and Dick, calling them "Phillip S Dack or Sean K Dick." Pretty awesome all around.



































Posted by James Friedman