Grounding Practice: Nkisi

Watch back an in conversation and live demonstration with musician, producer, and visual artist Nkisi.

In this Grounding Practice talk, Nkisi, the alias of Melika Ngombe Kolongo, gives an insight into the technical and conceptual processes that shape her practice – one that encompasses powerful club production equally influenced by African polyrhythms, hardcore techno, and 70s Italian horror films; fierce 160+bpm percussive DJ sets. She works as co-founder of NON Worldwide, a collective of experimental artists from across the African diaspora. 
 
Shedding light on her recent research into gesture, improvisation, and investigation of ancient sonic traditions and experimentation, Nkisi was joined in conversation by Eleni Ikoniadou, a writer, theorist and practitioner who specialises in digital art and critical theory, drawing on contemporary sonic, technocultural, and alternative futurisms.

This Grounding Practice talk was programmed in conjunction with Amplify Digital Arts Initiative (DAI) 2022, an online programme bringing together an international network of female-identifying and non-binary artists and professionals working within the fields of digital arts and electronic music, produced in partnership with British Council, MUTEK, Oi Futuro and Artlab.

ABOUT ELENI IKONIADOU

Eleni Ikoniadou is Reader in Digital Culture and Sonic Arts at the Royal College of Art. Her research sits at the intersection of art, theory, and technoculture, with specific attention to sound and voice. Her latest research project, funded by the EPSRC Human-Data Interaction Network Plus, investigates machine learning in Art, Music & the Culture Industries. She runs Fugitive Voices for the MA Visual Communication and is a resident host on Movement radio. As member of the art group AUDINT, with Steve Goodman (kode9) and Toby Heys, she co-edited the anthology Unsound: Undead (Urbanomic/ MIT 2019) and produced a series of exhibitions, under the same name, funded by the Arts Council of England (2018-2020). She is founder and co-editor of the Media Philosophy Series (Rowman & Littlefield) and author of the monograph The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media and the Sonic (The MIT Press, 2014).