Lloyd Dunn in Cairo – A Residency Connecting Experimental Music and Czech Language Teaching

Lloyd Dunn is a multimedia artist who has been systematically engaged with machine-generated and mediated media since the 1980s. He earned his MFA from the University of Iowa, focusing on multimedia and electronic music. In the 1980s and 1990s, he published the influential magazines Photostatic and Retrofuturism, which entered major international archives, including the library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1987, he co-founded the experimental collective Tape-beatles, whose performances and recordings radically questioned concepts of authorship, copyright, and appropriation. Since 2009, he has developed the project nula.cc, an online platform dedicated to filecasts, collage, time-based media, and reflections on perception in the digital age.

Lloyd Dunn spent more than a month in residence in Cairo. The Czech Centre was able to support the residency in cooperation with Veronika Resslová, a Czech language lecturer at Ain Shams University. During his stay, we connected Lloyd with several prominent figures from the local experimental and alternative music scene—artists working with soundscapes, field recordings, and long-form sound compositions. These encounters created space for the exchange of experiences across cultural contexts and opened possibilities for future collaborations.

Together with Veronika Resslová, Lloyd also prepared a workshop for several groups of students that originally combined Czech language instruction with a practical introduction to working with sound. The focus was placed on Czech pronunciation and rhythm, which students subsequently processed through recording and editing in open-source software. The workshop thus offered not only language practice but also foundational technical skills related to sound creation and post-production—demonstrating how language itself can be approached as material for creative work.