The Avant/Garde Diaries

As any techno fan, myself included, can tell you, Juan Atkins is considered one of the elders of techno, which was born in the rapidly changing world of Metro Detroit. Even as the city, once one of the fastest growing cities in the world, was being hollowed out by white flight, the edges of the city were giving birth to a new musical vitality informed by funk, Kraftwerk, Chicago House, new technologies, and other currents of the period.

In this new video from the Avant/Garde Diaries, Atkins takes you through the urbanscape of a “postindustrial city” that he calls “cold and bleak”, but one that has never stopped acting as a muse for creatives like himself.

In a new video for the Avant/Garde Diaries, the photographer Pete Eckert explains that despite his blindness, he has a kind of sight — his own vision of the world.

Yousuke Fuyama is a Tokyo-based artist, composer, programmer, and graphic designer. At the age of twelve, armed with a small tape recorder, he began recording and cataloging the various found sounds in his environment. This eventually led to an obsession with synthesizers, samplers, digital audio processing, and recording technology. As a college student, Fuyama’s research focused on computer programming and data interconversion as a means of further expanding the possibilities of multimedia art.

Motoi Yamamoto makes elaborate installations using a very nontraditional contemporary art material, table salt. For the latest installment of The Avant/Garde Diaries, the Japanese artist traveled to the salt flats of western Utah to discuss life, death, rebirth, and art.

Brooklyn artist Scott Campbell is a typical New York creative in that he’s passionate about his eclectic tastes and interests. One of his loves is a Monday night radio show on East Village Radio by the hilariously named Chances With Wolves (DJs Justin Cox and Kenan Juska). The musical duo excavate some of the most obscure, funkiest, and freakiest soul and R&B records you can imagine, and their beats, Campbell says, are great because “they never play the obvious.”

Chances With Wolves posts their playlist and program on their blog and reading the names are like looking into a portal you never knew was there.

“I really like the idea that there are these people that didn’t know how beautiful their records were for some reason,” Justin Cox explains in this latest video from The Avant Garde Diaries

It’s nice to know that every Monday night there’s a little tribe that follows the beats and aural musings of some forgotten artists who deserve another listen. It really does sound pretty avant garde.

Tom Matton is a rare kind of designer and architect who looks past the commercial life of objects to explore the underlying realities of their existence. And like many adventurous creators, he took a chance.

His exploration led him far from the life he knew in The Netherlands, and the growing discomfort he had with suburban building practices. He proudly makes no apologies for his thinking that this is the time to challenge the logic of “greedy capitalism,” something that has impacted his work from the beginning.

“If you don’t have a job in the big city, then you’re a loser,” he says bluntly. In the countryside, he explains, things are different, but you’ll have to watch this latest video from the Avant/Garde Diaries to hear his wonderful explanation.