Tahj Lakey is a recording artist, storyteller, and community curator from Inglewood, CA who explores personal/family narrative as a baseline for understanding [Black] radical tradition and futurist world-building. He is a Yale graduate, founder of "Herb N’ Sound" – a community-based, music enterprise promoting food justice – and co-founder of New Nuclear Media, a children’s educational media company.
James Quash Stevens, IV is a multimodal artist and designer based in Los Angeles whose work spans education, music, data, and sports. He is the founder of quash.lab, a design research studio at the intersection of computation and culture. He holds degrees from MIT and USC lovine Young Academy.
“This project draws from the hip hop practice of sampling – remixing fragments of memory and music to deconstruct, reassemble, and scaffold new meaning. Situated at the intersection of ritual, storytelling and speculative futures, it invites audiences to manipulate time-based media, engage with personal archives, and interact with futurist artifacts that challenge traditional music-making conventions.
Through this process, we aim to cultivate new methods of convening with the ancestors – responsive and reflective of collective creativity. During our residency, we seek to inspire wonder about the future by re-sampling the past, blending cultural memory and play into an immersive experience.”