Technoetic Arts - Volume 12, Issue 2-3, 2014

Juxtaposing recent site-responsive art installations by artists Mame-Diarra Niang (b.1982, France) and Dineo Seshee Bopape (b.1981, South Africa), this article explores the various geographic, virtual and cultural spaces that the artists simultaneously inhabit in their respective practices. Through interviews with the artists and contextual analysis of their recent projects, one can begin to understand the complex strategies each artist brings to bear to communicate compellingly beyond standard conceptions of past, present and future. Particular attention will be paid to Niang’s Dak’Art 2014 performance Éthéré, which offered a subtle yet trenchant critique of homophobia and related hate crimes in Senegal. Bopape’s aesthetic, meanwhile, exemplified in installations such as but that is not the important part of the story draws on references including slave rebellion and Shembe religious rites. This article will argue that their individual approaches in fact share a number of affinities that can prove revelatory in our understanding of black hauntology, mining the ways in which contemporary African artists alternately negotiate spaces – whether physical, virtual or recorded – and memory.

Looking at the digital–cultural–political means of resistance and media activism on the Internet, this article explores Internet art practices in South Africa as a manifestation of cultural dissent towards western hegemony online. Confronting the unilateral flow of online information, Afro Cyber Resistance is a socially engaged gesture aiming to challenge the representation of the African body and culture through online project. Talking as examples the WikiAfrica project, Cuss Group’s intervention Video Party 4 (VP4) and VIRUS SS 16 by artiste Bogosi Sekhukhuni, this article attempts to demonstrate that the use of the Internet as a medium for digital cultural production and as a platform of dissemination is crucial to raise social awareness and defy African stereotypes and misrepresentation. Creating a unique visual language using the ‘global’ aesthetics of the Internet, yet rooted in African culture, these works deeply reflect on the social environment they spawn from and therefore act as cultural and visual resistance.

This article addresses the development of an online residency platform Floating Reverie, for artists who work in and around digital media. The particular focus of this article is on the methodology used by the curator of the residencies and the artists as a form of networked curation within a South African creative digital art context.

Hip hop artists are early adopters of digital media in the township areas of Grahamstown. This article describes the emergence of particular media ecologies that depend on a do-it-yourself ethic where young people are always ‘hustling’ to get hold of data bundles, software and computer parts, and assembling them in novel ways. This mobile-first generation are increasingly adopting desktop and laptop computers to supplement their media production, and could provide insights into the evolution of low-income digital media practices and the transition from mobile-only to mobile-first (computer-second) practices, as well as how the computer’s increased affordances for production influence such digital media practices. Living in backyard shacks made from corrugated iron and mud, where there are makeshift electrical connections criss-crossing the roof and no flowing water inside, here there is indeed Internet connectivity, although exclusively through the mobile phone. These hip hop artists are supported by various digital service providers, such as WAP-site designers who hack together sites that function both to promote and distribute local media as well as pirated content, to backyard computer repairers who cannibalize parts from discarded old PCs to create workable township machines. This article will provide a digital ethnography of these young people and how they work collectively to record and mix music, design posters, album covers and avatars, and then distribute these through their phones via Bluetooth and online social media. The article will tie these digital practices to the identity formation of these young people, who resist ­succumbing to the despair of unemployment through embracing notions of themselves as artists, hustlers and ‘explorers of technology’, identities they attribute to the local culture of hip hop music production and its values of consciousness, creativity and resilience.

mim•ic•ry (n.pl.mim•ic•ries)

1. (a) the art, practice, or art of mimicking;

(b) an instance of mimicking.

2. Biology: The resemblance of one organism to another, or to an object in its surroundings for concealment and protection from predators. In evolutionary biology, mimicry is a similarity of one species to another, which protects one or both. This similarity can be in appearance, behaviour, sound, scent or location. Mimics are typically found in the same areas as their models.

The pervasive condition of African architectural education and practice is one of mimicry, in which students and architects are (sub-consciously) driven to copy ‘solutions’ posed by practitioners outside the continent, most typically European or American, whose understanding and experience of Africa is often limited in nature. Wired, switched-on and connected, current and future young African architects are able, at the click of a finger, to peruse the ‘appearance, behaviour and [even] scent and sound’ of buildings and architectural projects that they may never experience ‘in the flesh’, but whose form, material and programmes are multiplying across the continent in ways and places that their original ‘makers’ could not possibly have imagined. Maboneng is now ‘the Manhattan of Africa’; Kigali its Singapore. Unlike biological mimics, in this context a ‘cut-and-paste’ approach neither protects nor conceals: it simply exposes. As far back as 1997, the Dutch architect and theorist, Rem Koolhaas, argued that it had become increasingly important for architects to operate on a level independent of architecture in order to understand, at the most basic level, the phenomena affecting the development of architecture and the city. In this article, rather than treat ‘cut-and-paste’ as pastiche, a quick-fix intervention that solves the ‘problem’ of original thinking, a new proposition for An Architectural Brief, for An (as yet) Unnamed African Architectural Student, in An (as yet) Unnamed African Location is proposed which fuses art, culture and digital technology to demand a radical, post-Afro urban example.

This article addresses Technology Arts Education in South Africa, in particular the case of the development and mutant growth of the Digital Arts department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 2003 to present. The article addresses the difficulties of working in a strongly discipline-orientated university system, and the small but fascinating successes that have led to major developments in the department. The focus is on the mechanisms of collaboration that have both evolved and been purposefully put in place for a trans-disciplinary education structure to be successfully run. These exist between subject divisions in the School of Arts; and further between the Faculty of Humanities (in which the Digital Arts department is housed) and the Faculty of Engineering, at the University of the Witwatersrand. We address historical collaborations and how these allowed for further developments across disciplines. Through a process of unpacking and presenting, we explore the errors and identify those aspects that we feel are still missing. These include a focus on concepts that have been passed over due to issues around course structure and discipline ownership. We conclude with a look to the future, to opportunities to develop uniquely African Digital Arts practice.

Over the last four years I have been drawing on aspects of my own visual art practice (‘data capture’ digital drawing performances, 2004–) in my drawing teaching at the University of Cape Town. For this article I would like to share these projects and discuss the relevance of incorporating multimedia engagement in the teaching of traditional drawing at a tertiary level. First, moving images, sound, digital devices such as smartphones, tablets and engagement in online platforms are primary mediators of experience for many urban citizens. I find it relevant for students to not only reflect critically on the use of digital tools and online social platforms, but to experience and explore engaging with them directly as an experience by making them physical through drawing. In my experience through my teaching practice I have observed how this embodiment of the technology can provide useful tools of processing the volume of immaterial information that we engage with on a daily basis. A physical processing of multimedia material can also operate to provide an interesting engagement with perception, cognition and orientation. At another level, by bringing different media together in the physical studio of life drawing, there can be an interesting reflection and experience of different states of being in the world. These aspects are discussed through descriptions of a selection of my own creative practice and a second-year drawing project I teach at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town titled, ‘Interface: Image and text, the portrait as Dialogue’.

Modernity’s grand plans were designed far from where we stand today. The prerogative of progress as an ideological imperative that defined colonialism as a natural balance between the ‘developed’ societies’ moral duty to rescue ‘underdeveloped’ peoples from their fate of myth and superstition created education. Education that functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic and aesthetics of the status quo and to bring about conformity to the hegemonic cultural form of western technological consumer capitalism. This article explores whose education and for whom was it created by the imperial ideologies, not of nineteenth- or twentieth-century colonialism but for twenty-first-century western technological consumer neo-colonialism. From South Africa’s Apartheid era Liberation before education to Paulo Freire’s practice of freedom, this article questions the practices of new technologies, art and technology education at the edge of the disenfranchised. The traditional frameworks of education are on an ideological and methodological crisis worldwide. The hegemony of knowledge has ruptured away from academia. The linearity of thought has burst open as an omni-directional array. The hierarchy of authorship is contested and the audiences are becoming users and participants. As the ubiquity of information technologies, the emergence of connectedness, cheap chips and the presage of the Internet of things permeates every aspect of a particular section of people clustered in specific cities and spread out around the globe, a unique consciousness is evolving where a new collaboration paradigm is gaining a place of balance between us, nature and our technologies, our positions on social justice, and is evolving a symbiotic outlook at other cultures and societies.

This article is an interrogation of a small practical project I recently undertook to examine the relation between ‘studio exercises’, commonplace in creative practices, and ‘training’ that is typical of corporate environments, to see how this affects the use of technology in each context. This project titled ‘Office Exercise’ focuses on the relationship between the roll of ‘experiment’ and ‘exercise’ in the production of creative work involving technology. As a series of works ‘Office Exercise’ examines creative practice involving technology and the tensions it produces between the artistic applications of technology to a given situation and the simultaneous proficiency/competency of the use of this technology.

Creating a mobile software-based exploration (artwork?/app?) puts the artist-coder in a position to interact with the mediated image streams that connect people on the Internet. The mediated streams often contain portraits and self-portraits, selfies, of the participants. These selfies are visual status messages of the people participating in the data streams. They can be used by the poster to identify themselves in the data stream and represent a way the creator of the selfie wants to be seen by the social circle in which the image is posted. These images could reveal recognizable characteristics of the subject. The characteristics could be recognizable by people and software along the mediated path that the image traverses. Algorithmic intervention on the image affects the human and software interpretation of the image. In the works #autoselfie and FIFO ribbon, images are modified on a pixel level, in a way that the user of the app/work cannot control completely. The modifications reveals the potential power of the software systems to modify the imagery that people use to identify themselves in mediated communication environments. Moreover, the changes applied are chosen by the artist coder to impede recognition by software systems downstream but make human recognition possible in some cases. The alterations make the software in the app visible on a pixel level. The works then let the user post the altered images on Twitter or Google+ social media streams. The framing of this work as artwork or mobile app creates a tension, which affects audience interpretation and user experience choices made by the artist. These ideas are explored in the 2013 work #autoselfie and the 2014 work FIFO ribbon that runs on Android devices. #autoselfie was used to remix images created by winners of the South African 2013 Sanlam National Portrait Award, to explore the intervention of algorithms on mediated portraits and self-portraits.

This article reflects on the conceptual and aesthetic practices engaged in the development of a performance work by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum titled DISRUPTERS, THIS IS DISRUPTER X. Nkosi/Sunstrum liberally describe this multimedia performance work as an ‘anti-opera’. In 2014, the Iwalewahaus African Art Archive at the University of Bayreuth invited Nkosi and Sunstrum to make further developments to an anti-opera they had been conceiving since 2013. The invitation formed part of ‘Mashup The Archive’, an artist residency encouraging contemporary artists from Africa to engage with the Iwalewahaus Archive. The resulting performance was presented at the Schokofabrik, Bayreuth and was a tour through a ‘maquette’ of the anti-opera. It was a ‘living maquette’ in which audiences (termed ‘Safarists’) travelled through stations illustrating sketches of scenes, histories of characters, and other fragments of narrative exposition. The artists illustrated these stations using both ‘relics’ from the Iwalewahaus Archive, and newly generated digital and analogue content. Using a common tactic found in electronic music known as ‘sampling’, Nkosi/Sunstrum recontextualized and reinvented these artefacts to form part of the anti-opera narrative. The world of the anti-opera was created by video projections, sound streamed live to Bayreuth from Johannesburg, handmade replicas of archival objects, original music created from archival instruments, live performers and a professional opera singer. South African literary theorists Delphi Carstens and Mer Roberts suggest that the sci-fi genre ‘offers a potential vehicle for expressing the African oral mythical mode and a (re)writing of the continent’s marginalized oral histories in the mythopoeic mode’.1 Nkosi/Sunstrum are interested in the radical implications of this view and are using sci-fi as a tactic for imagining and ‘occupying’ new African futures.

The city of Johannesburg pulsates with rhythms that are driven by some of its most fundamental characteristics: pressured economic activity, the mingling and movement of bodies, commuting, and a history of race and class segregation. The collaborative Jozi Rhythmanalogues project attempts to make sense of these rhythms by employing sensory experience as a process of explorative thought. In the course of this project, public spaces are documented over long periods through time-lapse films, which are analysed to reveal patterns of movement. The resulting graphs, representing a kind of ‘automatic writing’ of the city’s rhythms, are interpreted as a graphic score by musical ensembles, producing music, sound and noise. This article reflects on the explorations of spaces, methods and concerns that has led to the development of the Jozi Rhythmanalogues project’s different manifestations, and looks at the ways in which two very different ensembles have interpreted the graphic score. The key questions that emerge relate to the nature of the information that is captured or ‘written’ in the graphs, and what it means to attempt, over and over, to make sense of this information. The idea of ‘sensory thought’ is critical here, as the project in its entirety is concerned with the work of the senses as a thinking process. This phenomenological angle is complicated by the flirtation with abstract data in the measurements that comprise the production of the graphs, revealing a question of movement between poetic and analytical modes of apprehension.

Have humans always had the desire to inhabit other worlds? From the microscopic scale to the vastness of outer space, it seems our capacity for occupying uninhabitable spaces with our intellect, our bodies, our sensorium, our desire, is fundamental to our being.

What are these spaces and how do we come to ‘know’ them? Whether mythological, religious or scientific, these minute or vast worlds are spaces that we unfold, narrate and dwell in. In his short story ‘The Stone Sky’ the novelist Italo Calvino writes of the inhabitants who live in a world that exists beneath the earth’s crust. These inhabitants who occupy the underworld exist in a mutable form that allows them to travel through the dense, dark inner landscape of the earth, through the crystal structures, the nickel sea to the earth’s core, an intricate viscous landscape quite other than the formation of matter on the earth’s surface. Calvino’s narration tells us of what is it to inhabit the interstices of the underworld, to be in a space with little intervening air, to live within the deep time scale of crystal formation. The neuroscientist Christof Koch states that ‘we live in a universe where organised bits of matter give rise to consciousness’ and that we need to extend our understanding of what consciousness really is. Could it be that these other worlds, whether planets only just glimpsed through early telescopes, or nano-landscapes at the scale of the atom are still integrated with our own fundamental make-up? Are they the product of a vastly developed pre-frontal cortex or are they a result of ideas, knowledge and experiences accumulated over billions of years? In this article I will look at the concepts of matter as a carrier of consciousness and of panpsychism as a tool with which to understand our habitation of other worlds.

Revisiting Dawkin’s proposal of memes – a piece of thought copied from person to person – raises the question: can narrative, and by extension narratology, be utilized to explore the ‘infecting’, or transferring agent of cultural ideas, identity and the creation of self? Intriguingly, and perhaps even more relevant to the role of emergent models and the shifting divide between engineered and organic constructions, what role does media play in the fabrication of self? This article proposes to examine various attempts to define modes of being using the formative and delimiting lens of narrative. It will investigate the role of media as the carrier agent for memetic modes of being, and their application in creating and sustaining cultural individuation. Jung’s declarative of the collective unconscious and archetypes, as well as Hofstadter’s loops, a common, but neglected field of enquiry that interrogates how memetic transference begins with the stories we tell, will inform the exploration of narrative as a means to define, delineate and bound the self.

The writing piece ‘Literal transitions’ proposes a literary answer to the question as to whether a potential transit from the word ‘organic’ to the word ‘digital’ exists. The piece as well as its creation process and the author’s comments on it will be described in the following. What can result from this experiment is a reflection of the language material itself, a certain degree of awareness of the implications of the traditional or unconscious constraints in language. Literal Transitions is not an explanation, but an examination with artistic means. This examination is based on three assumptions: (1) the potential of literature unfolds when writing is constrained; (2) restrictions make the language’s silence speak and (3) we need fictions to build our world.

The Hybrid Constitution/Melez Anayasa defines the principles upon which a Hybrid Constitution between nature and technology is based. This is an artistic task, because nature and technology cannot inscribe their Magisteria as beings and rights inside a ‘Constitution’, but a beginning for a new utopic non-human-centred vision. The Hybrid Constitution is based on the assumption that best constitution is a mixed system, including human, nature, and low- and high-tech elements. This constitution distinguishes between human citizens, who had the right to participate in the state, and non-citizens and Others, who had the right to be represented. The otherness. The Hybrid Constitution/Melez Anayasa is an artwork presented at the Amber Festival in Istanbul in 2011 and the argument of an essay published in the AUT AUT issue 361/2014 and titled La condizione postumana.

This article explores the construction of narrative through multiple vehicles and its function as currency in systems of representation and communication. Information derived from events and sets of relational events configured through their production and dissemination in the network model of communication challenges the existing theoretical frameworks of narrative construction. This article considers the capture of former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi as a mechanism to examine the role of the network model of communication in the construction of narrative through the lens of cognitive narratology and radical constructivism. In doing so, it considers the event-indexing situation model (EISM) as a possible instrument for enabling a cognitive construction of narrative stemming from event information produced and disseminated within the network model of communication.

‘Engineered’ and ‘organic’ have always represented two sides of a challenge that went along with human evolution. Since the dawn of its existence, humankind has been trying to adapt ‘Nature’, the phenomenal world, to his goals, through projects, techniques, instruments, devices, machines, in a process that received propulsion and acceleration from the advent of symbolic ability. Inside the phenomenal world, the ‘organic’ – the material carbon-based dimension on which life is founded, according to the sciences – has always represented a very important subsystem, mainly the world of the living. The ‘organic’ as food, support, pleasure, invention, care, with human skill, has been developing since prehistory, to select, hybridize and breed animals and plants, through more and more successful techniques ranging from crossbreeding to genetic manipulation and engineering. But also as ways to take care of the human body and life with tools, dresses, signs, machines and medical treatments. Scientific evolution has led to the capacity to deeply modify existing organisms and create new ones, new species that would never have evolved naturally. One major technique to describe and simulate the world and to interoperate with Nature is digital technology. Artificial intelligence, artificial life and robotics are mainly digitally based, working at the edge of Nature and the engineered. Digitally based technologies such as 3D printing and the Internet of Things can get to an intimate relationship among the engineered, the organic and Nature, blurring the divide between matter and language, life and code, ‘hardware’ and ‘software’. Hence, through sciences and technologies humanity is creating a Third Life originating from knowledge and culture, which is independently and autonomously evolving, expanding Nature from inside the realm of Nature.

This article explores the use of interactive and kinetic technologies in contemporary art practice as a means by which artists engage with conditions of social and ecological crisis. In a context in which the perpetual exploitation of human and natural resources threatens the sustainability of the planet and all earthy life, the language of interactivity provides perspective into the interconnectivity of organisms and the interdependence of biological, social, economic and political systems. The interactive, kinetic work affords a distilled set of relationships and movements that rely on connection and participation and, as such, serve as simple and relatable models of complex and interrelated systems. By engendering a sense of fragile suspension between sustainability and collapse – a felt experience of the present ecological crisis – the artists discussed incite affective responses through their works that are argued to be distinctly empathic in nature. Contemporary environmental theory provides insight into a shifting relationship between human and ‘nature’ that dissolves the previously instated binary in favour of an empathic consciousness, at the core of which is a recognition of the interdependence of living organisms. Art historical insight of interactivity as a means of production reveals a notable link between interactive art, destruction and trauma. The affective response engendered in contemporary works that grapple with concepts of transience and mortality relies on the very human knowledge of the body as a relatable site of experience, particularly pain and trauma. The idea of empathy as prefigured by violence and loss is particularly resonant in relation to contemporary ecological trauma. Works by artists including Rebecca Horn, Theo Jansen, Natalie Jeremijenko, Alan Rath, Lygia Clark, Alexandra Karakashian and Robert Krishner are discussed in terms of interactivity and kineticism as prompting empathic engagement in the context of environmental entropy.