Ben Caldwell at
Art + Practice

Ben Caldwell, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell (installation views) (2024–25). Art + Practice, Los Angeles, 2024–25. Images courtesy of the artist, Art + Practice, and the California African American Museum. Photos: Joshua White.

During an interview with AfroLA, Ben Caldwell sketched out a few scenes from his childhood in Deming, a border town in rural New Mexico. Describing nighttime in that flat landscape, he explained, “if you’re in the desert, it’s almost like you’re going through space because you can feel the movement, you can feel space and space is there. There’s nothing between you and the universe.”¹ This notion of collapsing space—a place where the division between you and I and earth and air ceases to exist—stood out to me while visiting the exhibition, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Media Arts of Ben Caldwell presented at Art + Practice (A+P) in collaboration with California African American Museum (CAAM).

Curated by Jheanelle Brown and Robeson Taj Frazier (and inspired by a 2023 monograph written by Frazier and Caldwell),² the exhibition translates Caldwell’s artistic journey, spanning from his adolescence in the 1960s up to the present day, into a tactile archive. Divided into four rooms, the exhibition bursts with photographs, films, videos, books, ephemera, poems, music, and media experiments (such as a musical bench and an interactive pay phone). While built around Caldwell’s personal and creative history, the exhibition also circles out and away from him, marking his collaborations with a variety of artists and community members through KAOS Network, a multimedia arts hub and cultural center that Caldwell has been operating in the heart of Leimert Park for nearly 40 years. In crafting a retrospective of Caldwell, the exhibition doubles as a cacophonous media archive of the imaginative energies pulsing within this historic neighborhood, and of Caldwell’s role in creating community within it.

While the exhibition uses archival photographs, films, and video footage to illustrate Caldwell’s formative years in New Mexico and beyond, including his draft into the Vietnam War and his decision to study film at the University of California, Los Angeles in the ’70s, the bulk of KAOS Theory highlights the numerous projects that have been incubated at KAOS Network since it opened in 1984. Caldwell wanted the space (originally known as Video 3333) to be a multigenerational hub where young folks could build relationships with their elders and by extension themselves and their histories.³ This desire for intergenerational dialogue was joined by Caldwell’s interest in technology: The space provided neighborhood kids the tools and time to learn video production and animation as a means of self-expression. During the late ’80s and ’90s, the center embraced emerging technologies like the internet through workshops on web development and digital graphic design, which Caldwell presented as new media tools that students could hack to broadcast their own visions.⁴ In 1990, he decided to change the center’s name after attending a lecture at the American Film Institute on chaos theory. Later, Caldwell’s wife Pam, who also attended the talk, showed him the Sanskrit meaning of chaos: “where brilliant dreams are born.”⁵

One of the dreams that Caldwell helped cultivate at KAOS was Project Blowed, the influential open-mic and workshop event series geared towards underground hip-hop artists drawn to the weird and the experimental. The project was founded by rappers Aceyalone and Abstract Rude; Caldwell gave the collective a space to hone their skills and host events. Ephemera from the ‘90s and early 2000s dot the walls and appear within display cases at A+P, including a partially ripped sign that lists the house rules of Project Blowed’s events.⁶ One reads: “This is a Hip Hop Educational Seminar, where styles are shown so many can learn and grow.” This ephemera is joined in the exhibition by music videos like “Mic Check” from 1995, which played on a small monitor in a small room dedicated to the musicians of Project Blowed. In this video, which recreates a KAOS open mic night, Aceyalone coolly raps over scenes of the crowd and shots of a glitching television. Caldwell also directed the film Hip Hop Habana (2006), a documentary that follows a group of Project Blowed artists in Havana as they meet up with Cuban rappers. In these portraits, the neighborhood cackles with bravado and innovation, as Caldwell records one way that KAOS artists forged their creative language.

Another KAOS project, Sankofa Red (2013), repurposes a payphone into an interactive audio installation. Set up in the corner of a room labeled “Kaos Laboratories,” the project was created by the Leimert Park Phone Company, a design collective composed of University of Southern California professors and students, game designers, hackers, and residents of Leimert Park.⁷ Initially conceived by Caldwell, the phone allows visitors to listen to personal testimonials about the neighborhood’s history alongside voice prompts that encourage people to add their own stories. Cupping the receiver to my ear, I pressed five on the keypad and was greeted by a woman who shared a story about her cousin Mo and their efforts to keep in touch over the phone during his incarceration. They would connect about their love of mindfulness and her anger towards law enforcement. Other testimonials included a musician recalling his experience playing the World Stage, the legendary performance arts center, followed by an anecdote about how its co-founder Kamau Daáood would call folks on the phone to invite them to shows. In remixing a public object, Caldwell honors the history of Leimert Park while allowing residents to share stories of connection.

Alongside KAOS and its array of projects, Caldwell’s films offer another reflection of his expansive artistic voice. Driven by a desire to “emancipat[e] the image,”⁸ his early film work rejected the traditions of commercial Hollywood cinema and instead pulled inspiration from jazz, blues, literature, painting, performance, and history. His first film project, Medea (1973), screened on A + P’s main gallery wall, made to look like it was emitting from a 16mm projector. Beginning with trembling shots of roving clouds, the film collapses the histories of the African diaspora into six minutes. Pre-colonial photographs dance next to portraits from Jim Crow-era America. Intercut between these still images is footage of a pregnant woman resting beneath a canopy of trees. Without dialogue, the film’s narrative is guided by the rhythms of a gong, which evokes the sounds of a beating heart. Free from cinematic conventions, Caldwell crafts a new film grammar, emphasizing the virtuosity of image and sound to collapse the space between past and present.

Caldwell’s creative life within and beyond KAOS Network enacts a similar language, where the space between us all ceases to exist. In bringing together then and now, Caldwell’s films demonstrate his role in the Leimert Park community. Across the many community-designed projects launched at KAOS, what stands out is Caldwell’s ability to nurture this ecstatic form of collectivity in ways that challenge our fixed sense of time and space.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 39.

Ben Caldwell, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell (installation views) (2024–25). Art + Practice, Los Angeles, 2024–25. Images courtesy of the artist, Art + Practice, and the California African American Museum. Photos: Joshua White.

Allison Noelle Conner’s writing has appeared in Artsy, Art in America, Hyperallergic, East of Borneo, and elsewhere. Born in South Florida, she is based in Los Angeles.

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