In this talk, Tony Cokes discusses the text-animated artworks he’s been creating over the past decade, featuring statements such as “Disco isn’t dead. It has gone to war” and “If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late.” These “video essays,” as he calls them, are built around Cokes’s interests in pop music, sonic cultures, political rhetoric, and the relationship between criticism and the everyday experience of race. Rather than considering individual works in isolation, Cokes will discuss his constellations of works in large-scale installation spaces and his evolving desire to situate his art in the public sphere. Such “public readings” of textual material, he says, offer “a minor, embodied antidote to the ubiquity of advertising and to the increasingly privatized reading habits inculcated via the internet and mobile devices.”