American Artist and Tommy Martinez are two artists who collaborate on generative sound and video works that combine spoken text, synthesized music and interactive software.,American Artist works primarily in sculpture, software and video,while Martinez creates software and musical systems for the internet, embedded devices and live multichannel performance.
American Artist is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Visual Artand has exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.Their 2019 video installation Untitled is held in MoMA's collection galleries and immerses viewers in the digital interfaces of predictive policing software used by law enforcement, highlighting biases built into ostensibly neutral tools. American Artist is a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and a faculty member at Yale School of Art.
Martinez, who also goes by ogbabydiesal,has performed at MoMA PS1, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Fridman Gallery and Pioneer Works,and has lectured on sound and electronic art at the School for Poetic Computation, UC Berkeley, Stanford University and NYU.He was previously Director of Technology at Pioneer Works, where he led the Tech Residency,and is an adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and Integrated Design & Media program.He holds an MFA from the Sonic Arts program at CUNY Brooklyn College.
American Artist and Martinez created the performance Integrity Protocol / Lower Limb Lecture,which premiered at Pageant in Brooklyn on January 7, 2023 and was recorded later that year.In 2024 they released a generative interface remixing the recording as part of MoMA's Feral File exhibition “SOUND MACHINES”,,alongside artists including Yoko Ono and Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst.The work centers on a disembodied voice, American Artist's own, evoking what the pair have described as an empty personhood, or the lowest and least counted in society,with scrolling text captions set against a blue void recalling a computer's “blue screen of death”.
