An Interview with Sound Artist Caliph8

Manilla-based underground hip-hop godfather and sound artist Caliph8 came back to the ACC to install his piece “Clear as Mud” at the Club Monster exhibition, and performed at its opening party on November 23rd. This was his second time at the ACC, after his collaborative piece in May, “Vanishing Voices.” He was kind enough to sit down for a quick interview while he was in Seoul to answer a couple of questions about his work and the ACC.

Caliph8 Djing at the Space2 for the opening part of the exhibiton <Club Monster>!

What do you think about the ACC?

I was impressed with the ACC when I first heard about it, especially after I did my first project with the composer Young Gyu in May, with the Vanishing Voices project. Actually I met the curators in Manilla with Young Gyu two years before the actual project, so they interviewed me in Manilla, and it was amazing. I was really impressed by the idea that there’s a platform in Korea that wholeheartedly supports the arts, and more so artists from other countries. So I was really touched by that. It gave me hope for what it was I was doing because in Manila platforms similar to the ACC don’t really deal with my type of art. There’s too much politics there.

How would you compare your first exhibition at the ACC to your second one?

The first one was pretty intense and deep. It was very stimulating as far as meeting all the artists I was collaborating with, and the idea of the art project that we were doing was initially mind-boggling because we didn’t really know what we were going to do, which was really challenging. I really liked it because it tested everyone’s skill and ideas, and it came out well in the end. For the second one, I really liked the creative process behind it. I was a little last-minute so I was really cramming a lot, but I really liked the idea of cramming because it created a different type of output. The work I did with Club Monster was actually surprising because of how everything turned out in terms of the creative process. The first exhibition was more immersive, but the second one was different, more personal because it was a solo piece. I wasn’t collaborating with anyone, just me testing my knowledge and artistic capabilities. It was good to test myself and what I could do in such a limited time, and I was able to turn out something that I was proud of. They’re both different, but they’re both dope.

Where do you see the ACC going and where do you see yourself within its future?

I inquire and dig into what the ACC is doing, and what they have been doing over the past year, and I’m really impressed with the selection of artists and programs. There’s a lot of forward thinking stuff. While I was installing my piece for Club Monster there was another Japanese multimedia artist and I was hearing his stuff and it was mind-blowing. Some of the other multimedia artists in another section of the ACC were dealing with circuit bending, a lot of electronics in terms of audio and sound generators, which I’m very interested in. I think the ACC is really dipping itself into a lot of new media which a lot of my interest is in. I would like to propose to the ACC in the future because of that collaboration I did last May. I recently visited one of the artists from that project. His name is Asa Chan from Japan, and we did a collaboration with a live calligraphist and it was dope. Asa Chan and I have been talking about proposing this type of project to the ACC; maybe they would be interested in hosting this type of content.

Written by. Amos Farooqi, 9th ACC Reporters Corps