NEGATIVLAND BIOGRAPHY 2026
Since 1980, the various Floptops known as Negativland, a multimedia collective originally from California’s Bay Area, have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sounds, images, objects, and text.
Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland surreally re-arrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and “culture jamming” (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement.
While it is true that, after being sued, Negativland became more publicly involved in advocating significant reforms of our nation’s copyright laws (even finding themselves being brought to Washington DC and Capitol Hill as citizen lobbyists for copyright and art issues), Negativland are artists first and activists second. All of their art and media interventions have intended to pose both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, control, ownership, propaganda, power, and perception in the United States of America. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about and cited in over 150 books and legal journals, and they sometimes lecture about their work here and in Europe.
While their tactics and art practices have now become something a tween can do with a few clicks on their smartphone, Negativland is still interested in unusual noises and images (especially ones that are found close at hand), unusual ways to restructure such things and combine them with their own music and art, and mass media transmissions which have been sources and subjects for much of their work. Negativland covets insightful humor and wackiness from anywhere, low-tech approaches whenever possible, and vital social targets of any kind. Foregoing ideological preaching, but interested in side effects, Negativland is a subliminal cultural sampling service concerned with making art about everything we aren’t supposed to notice.
SUE-C BIOGRAPHY
Sue Slagle, who goes by the stage name SUE-C, is a video and light artist working at the intersection of creative coding and live performance.
For the past 20 years, she has created handmade videos and live media performances, traveling extensively in Europe and the US. Her works challenge the norms of photography, video, and technology by blending them all into an organic and improvisational live performance setting. Employing a variety of digital tools to create an experimental animation “instrument,” she synthesizes cinema from photographs, drawings, watercolors, handmade papers, fabrics and miniature lighting effects.
She currently works as a Video Designer at Meow Wolf and is a member of the Meow Wolf Workers Collective union.
More about Negativland
Negativland’s self tilted sound collage debut came out in 1980 when some of the members were still in high school. The album covers were handmade and numbered, with 15,000 one-of-a-kind covers (9000 vinyl and 6000 CD) eventually being made over the next 15 years. A vinyl re-issue is in the works.
ince 1981, Negativland and an evolving cast of characters have operated “Over The Edge,” a weekly radio show on KPFA FM in Berkeley, California. “Over The Edge” continues to broadcast, and over 34 years of shows are available at The Internet Archive.
A Big 10-8 Place came out in 1983. It was the groups third record and their first to be a concept album, a format they have more or less stuck to ever since. This tape splicing extravaganza, three years in the making, came in a wrap-around sleeve with poster, bumper sticker, inspection cards, hand embossed inner sleeve, and a baggie of lawn clippings (or beauty bark in the later CD version).
1987 saw the release of their seminal (and best selling) fourth album Escape From Noise, which contained fan favorite “Time Zones,” and the track “Christianity is Stupid,“ which lead to a startling ax-murder hoax that became the subject of 1989s Helter Stupid album.
1993 saw the release of Free, a reaction to the current state of affairs in the USA at that time, and in 1995 they released a 270-page book with 72-minute CD entitled Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2, documenting their infamous four-year long legal battle over their 1991 release of an audio piece entitled U2.
They were the subjects of Craig Baldwin’s 1995 feature documentary Sonic Outlaws and created the soundtrack and sound design for Harold Boihem’s 1997 documentary film The Ad And The Ego, an excellent in-depth look into the hidden agendas of the corporate ad world and the ways that we are affected by advertising.
1997’s Dispepsi was a high-concept collection of original music, songs, and collaged advertising that brought Negativland’s brand of thirsty cultural critique to the parched and dehydrated psyches of of young consumers everywhere. It focused on the impact of mass advertising via the idea of making a record that was about nothing but Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi (and a bit of Coke).
002 saw the issue of Deathsentences Of The Polished And Structurally Weak. Actual wrecking yard detritus, found notes, cassettes, laundry lists, etc, formed the basis of a poignant 64-page full-color book with read-along CD soundscape. The album was a return to pure noise collage and closest in spirit to A Big 10-8 Place, but utterly unique in the Negativland canon… no words, just sounds.
In 2004 Negativland worked with Creative Commons to write the Creative Commons Sampling License, an alternative to existing copyrights that is now widely used by many artists, writers, musicians, film makers, and websites.
In 2005 they released the elaborately packaged No Business (with CD, 15,000-word essay, die-cut outer sleeve, and custom-made whoopie cushion), and debuted “Negativlandland” – a large visual art show of over 80 pieces of their “fine art” works, videos, home-made electronic devices, and a life-sized animatronic Abe Lincoln robot, at New York City’s Gigantic Art Space. The exhibit traveled around the country, showing in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Houston, and Richmond, VA.
2007 saw the release of Our Favorite Things, a feature-length DVD collection of Negativland’s many years of collaborative film work, and in 2008 they surprised themselves and everybody else by putting out a toe-tapping all-singing song project of one member’s compositions called Negativland Presents Thigmotactic.
2014’s It’s All In Your Head found the group tackling their biggest subject ever: why so many humans believe in God.
This ambitious and densely-crafted double CD was packaged inside of an actual King James Holy Bible, repurposed into a “found” art object. Negativland mixed found music, found sound, found dialogue, guest personalities and original electronic noises into a compelling musical essay on monotheism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, neuroscience, suicide bombers, 9/11, cola, war, shaved chimps, and the all-important role played by the human brain in our beliefs. The audio was first presented in over 35 stage performances as a live radio broadcast (modeled after the “Over the Edge” radio program), with the album itself being assembled from tracks recorded live in front of blindfolded audiences, documenting the unique style of live collage performances that Negativland has been presenting on stages and radio since the formation of the group.
In late 2016, Negativland released a new CD entitled The Chopping Channel, volume 9 in an ongoing series of albums edited from their ongoing live mix radio show, Over The Edge. The first record released since the 2015 and 2016 deaths of long-time member Don Joyce and co-founder Richard Lyons, The Chopping Channel was a manic collage work about the ravenous commodification of every last aspect of our physical and emotional lives, and was completed in the months before Don died. Taking the packaging to its ultimate and logical conclusion, 1000 copies of the CD included actual “cremains” (ashes) of deceased member Don Joyce himself, and came with the gift of one of Don’s unique, handmade audio tape carts, used in the creation of “Over The Edge” and Negativland live performances as his “main instrument” from 1981 up until his death. As a statement from beyond the beyond, the release is perhaps the ultimate end game in Negativland’s history of found art, appropriation, repurposing and productizing. The “release” of Dons ashes in this manner kept with his lifelong devotion to the creation of art above all else, speaking to the degree to which virtually no idea in art was ever off-limits to him.
True false?
True False was Negativland’s 13th studio album and a return to all original music that you could mistake for actual songs, albeit ones being sung by dozens of sampled vocalists who have never met. The first of two (or is it three?) interconnected double albums, True False tackled concerns that will be familiar to any surviving fans of the band: our nervous systems, our realities, and the evolving forms of media and technology that orchestrate our perceptions. Shootings, bees, the right’s rules for radicals, climate control, dogs pretending to be children, the oil we eat, capitalism, and the right of every American to believe whatever they want to believe ….all were explored. It was the first Negativland album to come with a lyric sheet, and a reminder that we need more than just one memory before we can safely tell anyone else that this is not normal. Juxtaposing Occupy mic checks with US militia rallies, FOX news hosts and ecoterrorists, and your own sanity with the home viewing habits of Negativland’s lead vocalist, the Weatherman. As we witness the entrenched political beliefs of the left and the right cleanly switch sides in under a generation, when putting the word ‘True’ next to the word ‘False’, a broader reality reveals itself.
And what is “The World Will Decide”?
The mirror image sequel to 2019’s True False, The World Will Decide turns the focus away from our very human inability to accurately define reality, and towards the technologies being built to do a better job at it. If sorting true from false seemed like a full time job back when all we had to keep track of was our own minds, life alongside the machines built to connect us only seems to multiply these uncertainties. On this album those uncertainties are made almost deliriously danceable: a hallucinatory netweb of densely sampled voices melting speech into music and back again, into what we can all agree are the real questions — Did that firefly really land on your finger? Would you like to be arrested? Does this app connect you to people, or replace them? Is this post an example of inauthentic behavior? Do people have to die? Or, as one of the many sampled voices on this work will assure you: we can really feel like we’re here.
And, finally, just who is even in Negativland these days? Didn’t half of you die a few years ago?
For the creation of True False and The World Will Decide, Negativland consists of current core members Mark Hosler, David Wills, and Jon Leidecker, as well as Peter Conheim and our dearly departed Don Joyce, Richard Lyons and Ian Allen, who are just as sonically present on those albums as the rest of us who are still breathing. Containing found sound tapes from the earliest years of the band (including dozens of samples that will be very familiar to regular listeners of “Over The Edge”), True False and The World Will Decide fold the decades on top of each other until they finally resemble all of the feelings that tomorrow has for today.
Other members of the extended Negativland family include live cinema artist SUE-C (Sue Slagle), film maker Ryan Worsley, film maker/animator/OTE archivist Tim Maloney, digital artist Dan Lynch, designer Shawn Wolfe, Seeland Records HQ traffic controller Jennifer Bennett, and angel archivist Taylor Jessen. We couldn’t do this without you.
