Welcome back to our CLCF profile series, where each month we interview a CLCF researcher to hear more about their projects (check out our previous profiles here). This month, we’re delighted to be in conversation with Dr. Mark V. Campbell, Associate Professor of Music and Culture (UTSC). Mark V. Campbell is a DJ, scholar and curator. His research explores the relationships between Afrosonic innovations, hip-hop archives and notions of the human.

Photo courtesy of Mark Campbell

M.E.: In a nutshell, who are you as a researcher?

Mark: As a researcher my investments circulate around black creative praxis, artistic intelligence and the intimacies of technological subversion offered up by remix culture and hip-hop’s musical aesthetics. For the past decade I have devoted much of my research agenda to understanding hip-hop archives, after developing Northside Hip-Hop Archive in 2010. I work to ensure my research is community embedded and accessible as I partner with organizations and individuals to explore the multiple ways Black music forms offer preservation possibilities beyond institutional archival infrastructures.

 

Daphne: Based on your research, how do emerging technologies like AI complicate the processes of ownership and licensing in the music industry? Can you tell us about the platform you’re developing?

Mark: Emerging technologies initially offer glimpses of hope for a different set of relations beyond the dominant and exploitative contemporary moment. Sometimes the origins of emerging technologies are born out of desires to ‘improve’ our world, but too often, such technologies come under the control of those with significant economic power and they are made to serve the interests of the elites in Western society.

While new technologies often produce new complexities around old issues, my area of concern remains the throughline of extractive colonial practices in which exploitation, deception and oppression are acceptable practices. In many ways, if we look to the music industry, giants such as Spotify have really only replaced the recording industry’s practices with a more efficient level of extraction and exploitation.

Artists still cannot make a living wage from their music. Licensing and ownership still remain controlled by the legal establishment, while there is a small opening for independent artists to own their I.P., the emerging technologies are eventually owned, managed or exploited by corporations not communities. The scale at any cost mentality of corporations encourages them to grow into powerful entities quickly, so the sets of relations that ensured the Dutch East Indian Company or the Hudson’s Bay Company were ‘successful’ in the 1600s remain eerily intact.

The platform I’ve been building is focused on making the licensing of one’s artwork a frictionless process. The challenge of working with archival images and finding ways to attribute and circulate these images has been a major pain point in much of my research. So part of the solution I am building is to refashion workflows so that not only is the language of intellectual property accessible to artists and non-legal professionals, but licensing is considered before one shares their image online.

 

Rafael: Can you please share your perspective on Artistic Intelligence?

Mark: Artistic intelligence is a way of approaching the human made polycrisis that are plaguing many parts of the Western world. It is an inclusive and collaborative way to appreciate the multidimensionality of our problems by aggregating the creative perspectives which embolden artists to imagine and create beyond our present circumstances. Moving beyond Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, artistic intelligence offers us an opportunity to bring to bear the skills artists utilise and refine daily on urgent issues such as our climate crisis, extractivism, fast fashion or online disinformation.

In many ways, by embracing artistic intelligence we are building pathways that extend beyond Western European thinking, to move away from autonomy, objectivity and siloed thinking towards multiplicity, embodiment and a radical relationality. Rather than asking what can computers come to know (via artificial intelligence), why not ask what do artists already know? The act of creating art is older than our economies and nations, older than most technologies, why would we not turn in this direction for a different kinds of futures?

 

M.E.: What’s your star sign?

Mark: I was born premature by two months, so I usually find my personality doesn’t always correlate to my actual sign. What I will offer is my spirit animal, which is a turtle. I am inspired by their semi-aquatic lifestyle, their ability to retreat into a protective shell and they are omnivores, they hunt when they need to. Most importantly, turtles move at a pace that is not very North American, that’s goals right there.

Follow Mark’s work with CLCF here.