James Allister Sprang

Sprang (he/him) creates audiovisual installations using multiple mediums such as photography, cyanotype prints, and spatial audio technology that gives sound dimension and movement—offering “the opportunity to feel through the unseen,” he says. Informed by his family’s Caribbean heritage and experiences of immigration, his work considers diaspora, displacement, and survival. In 2019 at James created a work entitled Turning Towards a Radical Listening at The Kitchen. An immersive metaphor in which audiences were asked to reckon and reconcile with how their sonic experience of black voices was represented, given language and transcribed by AI over the course of 70 minutes. The resulting nonsense concrete poem demanded a consideration of how we exist between input and output— holding space for us to tune into what can be lost in translation.

His work has been included in exhibitions at Tate Modern, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts among many others.  He has been a Pew Fellow and a Knight Foundation Arts + Tech Fellow. Sprang earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from the Cooper Union.

Projects:

• AI.Assembly CoLAB
• Open Access: AI.Assembly