In Conversation: Jace Clayton

Jace Clayton is an artist and writer, also known for his work as DJ /rupture. He is Assistant Professor of Studio Art and Director of Graduate Studies at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Clayton is the author of Uproot: Travels in 21st Century Music and Digital Culture (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) and the forthcoming Behold the Monkey, for which he received a 2020 Arts Writers Grant, about contemporary art, faith, and social media. As an artist, Clayton’s interdisciplinary approach focuses on how sound, memory, and public space interact, with an emphasis on low-income communities and non-Western geographies. His writing appears in publications including 4Columns, Artforum, frieze, Bidoun, and New York Times Magazine. He has performed in over three dozen countries, as a solo artist and as director of large ensemble performances. His work has been exhibited internationally, most recently with They Are Part (2023) a solo exhibition at MassArt Art Museum in Boston.

Seb Chan is the Director & CEO of ACMI, guiding ACMI as a museum focused on screen culture and the intersection of media, technology, worldbuilding and storytelling. Before joining ACMI, he previously held senior positions at Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (New York), and Powerhouse Museum (Sydney). Before becoming known in the museum world, Seb had a successful life in electronic music as half of the Australian soundsystem Sub Bass Snarl (1992-present) who regularly performed across Australia in the 1990s and 2000s in everything from major festivals to squat raves and tiny clubs. Sub Bass Snarl performed alongside Surgeon, Squarepusher, The Bug, Rhythm & Sound as well as Coldcut, AtomTM, Meat Beat Manifesto, Shackleton, Jan Jelinek, Four Tet, Nonplace Urban Field/Burnt Friedman, Luke Vibert , Caribou (UK), Pan American, Prefuse73, and many more. They occasionally still perform today. He was part of the collective that founded long running weekly Sydney club night Frigid (1996-2006), touring many international crews to Sydney, and building a rich ecology of electronic and experimental music, and live film remixing and VJing. He also co-founded and published long running underground music magazine Cyclic Defrost (1998-present) and the Sound Summit festival (1999-2003) as part of the annual This Is Not Art in Newcastle. He produced a weekly radio show on 2SER (1995-2007) and Radio Skid Row (1991-1995).