Mendi & Keith Obadike

Mendi Lewis Obadike was born in 1973 in Palo Alto, California,[4] while her parents were completing graduate work at Stanford University.

[citation needed] Mendi wrote her first play and edited Focus literary journal while living in Atlanta and studying at Spelman College.

[citation needed] She graduated with highest honors in English and was awarded a fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in Literature and Sound Theory at Duke University,[10] and joined the Cave Canem Poetry Collective.

His mother worked as an administrator at the post office and his father (who studied briefly with inventor Buckminster Fuller) was an electrical engineer from Nigeria.

[citation needed] While growing up in Nashville, Keith studied classical piano, woodwinds and began programming BASIC on a TRS-80 computer, and worked as a sound designer and producer on the local hip-hop scene.

[citation needed] He later met and was influenced by electronic music composers like Paul Lansky and Olly Wilson while working at Duke University.

This work, exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in the 2001 group show "Race in Digital Space,"[11] generated much discussion both online and off when they offered Keith's Blackness for sale on eBay in 2001 as an Internet performance.

In 2002 Mendi and Keith premiered their Internet opera The Sour Thunder (Bridge Records, Inc.) which featured hypertext writings by literary critic Houston Baker, performance artist Coco Fusco and musician DJ Spooky among others.

Also in 2003 they launched "The Pink of Stealth", an Internet/ DVD surround sound work commissioned by the New York African Film Festival and Electronic Arts Intermix, and The Sour Thunder was broadcast internationally from 104.1 FM in Berlin and was released on CD from Bridge Records in 2004.

[12] They received a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship to develop an installation and album entitled TaRonda Who Wore White Gloves.

Their Internet opera, entitled Four Electric Ghosts, was developed for Toni Morrison's Atelier at Princeton University in 2005 and The Kitchen in New York in 2009.

They contributed a chapter to the 2008 Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a.

The album features music by Vijay Iyer, Guillermo E. Brown, Shelley Hirsch, George E. Lewis, Pamela Z, John Link, Paul Lansky, Tracie Morris, DJ Spooky, Daniel Bernard Roumain and Peter Gordon/Lawrence Weiner.

This two-song project was originally created for a benefit for the arts center Denniston Hill, founded by Paul Pfeiffer, Julie Mehretu, Lawrence Chua, Beth Stryker, Robin Vachal and kara lynch.

[19] The artists used their own field recordings from Harlem mixed with original music and excerpts of their performance of James Baldwin's short story "Sony's Blues.

It uses text from an unpublished story by science fiction writer Octavia Butler combined with swirling atmospheric recordings made by the Obadikes to create a circular sound reminiscent of the African-American folk dance, the ring shout.

The music in the installation was driven by the real-time changing stock prices of contemporary American companies with historical ties to the transatlantic slave trade, discovered under the ordinance required by the city.

This piece uses sounds from the Edmund Pettus Bridge (the site of 1965's Bloody Sunday) in Selma, Alabama to create a haunting version of the civil right anthem We Shall Overcome.