Part of the CCAM Sound Art Series 5-Year Anniversary 

The CCAM Sound Art Series continues with legendary sound-collage group Negativland and live cinema artist SUE-C, presenting their latest audio-visual performance SIGNIFICANTLY LESS DECEPTIVE. Exploring media, perception, and technology, Negativland’s provocative sound works meet SUE-C’s handmade, real-time video to create an immersive performance that fully activates the CCAM Leeds Studio sound system and projection wall.

For more than four decades, Negativland has redefined experimental media through their culture-jamming practice, exposing the mechanics of misinformation and spectacle. With SUE-C’s live visuals, their work becomes a dense, multi-sensory investigation into how collective belief systems are shaped.

The evening will begin with a conversation between the artists and series curator Ross Wightman (CCAM Technical Manager; Lecturer, Yale College), followed by the performance and a Q&A session with the audience. This event is co-sponsored by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Since 1980, the multimedia collective known as Negativland have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sounds, images, objects, and text. Mixing original materials and original music with materials taken from corporate-owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland rearrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and “culture jamming” (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement. Their art and media interventions pose both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, technology, control, ownership, propaganda, power, and perception in the United States of America. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about and cited in over 150 books and legal journals, and they sometimes lecture about their work in the USA and in Europe.

Sue Slagle, who goes by the stage name SUE-C, is a video and light artist working at the intersection of creative coding and live performance. For the past 20 years, she has created handmade videos and live media performances, traveling extensively in Europe and the US. Her works challenge the norms of photography, video, and technology by blending them all into an organic and improvisational live performance setting. Employing a variety of digital tools to create an experimental animation “instrument,” she synthesizes cinema from photographs, drawings, watercolors, handmade papers, fabrics, and miniature lighting effects. She currently works as a Video Designer at Meow Wolf and is a member of the Meow Wolf Workers Collective union.

The CCAM Sound Art Series is dedicated to the sonic arts in their many forms. Founded in 2020 by sound artist and curator Ross Wightman, the series presents a diverse range of guest artists whose work explores sound at the intersections of experimental music, installation, performance, and beyond. Alongside live presentations, the series creates space for open discussion, inviting audiences to engage directly with the artists and their work.