Bubblegum Club

Tag: cultural

  • Global Groove, Local Varbs: NTS X Diesel TRACKS Hits South Ah!

    This place has insane energy and a distinctively effortless cool that flows through the streets. It’s no wonder that this inexplicable local flair is increasingly resonating globally and major international brands are acknowledging the unique cool factor that defines South Africa. As more brands come knocking, it means more to us than mere recognition; it’s a nod to our unstoppable and ungovernable spirit. So it’s always a vibe when we see a suitable synergy between said big brands and the manifest movements we make on the ground.

    Initially rooted in denim mastery, Diesel was established in 1978 by Renzo Rosso. It’s now known as an innovative international lifestyle company and a leader in premium fashion, but what makes it interesting to us is that it’s remained a genuine alternative to the established luxury market. Beyond apparel, Diesel produces fragrances, watches, jewellery, interior design, and real estate projects through Diesel Living. Bolstered by its parent company OTB, Diesel continues to foster creativity.

    Originating in Hackney in 2011 as a DIY passion project, NTS is a global music platform and radio station that broadcasts from over fifty cities monthly with permanent studios in Los Angeles, Manchester, and Shanghai, with over 600 resident hosts, including musicians, DJs, and artists. Aiming to provide an alternative to mainstream radio, over half of the music played on NTS is unavailable on mainstream platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. With a growing global audience of 2.8 million monthly listeners, NTS continues to broadcast the best in underground music on a mass scale, free of charge and without on-air advertising.  

    Now the collaboration between NTS and Diesel TRACKS, which initially launched worldwide last year, has made its debut in South Africa. With a foundation in the fusion of music and nightlife, TRACKS gathers progressive musical talent from various corners of the world to champion the universal language of club culture, connection, and celebration. The focus is now on spotlighting emerging DJs who represent the distinctive local music scene and nightlife culture.

    local
    Image courtesy of Bandcamp

    Scheduled to take place every last Friday of the month, starting November 3rd, 2023, this initiative will champion a diverse array of sounds, including GQOM, House, Amapiano, Techno, Club, Experimental, and drum’n’bass. The inaugural artist, Teno Afrika, aka Lutendo Raduvha, unleashed the sounds of Soweto with his musical style that skillfully blends techno and electro with deep house, infusing elements of soul and jazz to craft harmonies, percussions, and basslines—an embodiment of the DIY essence of amapiano.

    Teno Afrika is rapidly rising in the realm of South Africa’s electronic music scene and has gained considerable international recognition. Growing up in the townships of Gauteng province, Teno Afrika discovered his passion for DJing and production on his father’s computer in 2007. His debut album, Amapiano Selections (2020), received acclaim for its minimal yet impactful exploration of the genre, while his second album, Where You Are (2022), features stellar collaborations with fellow artists, contributing to the genre’s evolution. 

    With features like this, TRACKS promises to be a sonic fusion that brings together mind-blowing musical mavericks and ignites the universal and invincible spark of club culture. Through dynamic mix series, electric live club nights, intriguing radio shows, stunning talent showcases, and generative roundtable discussions hosted by influential music professionals and collectives, who knows what kind of boundaries could be shifted and where this could take the future of nightlife? TRACKS is not just about music; it’s an invitation to dive into a world where beats and cultural connections collide in a symphony of transcendental energy.

    Access the featured DJ mixes at DIESEL or NTS! 

  • Artist Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga on negotiating the relationship between the past and present

    Artist Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga on negotiating the relationship between the past and present

    Eddy Kamuanga Illunga is a young artist from DRC whose work focuses on the nuanced layers of his country and hometown, Kinshasa. He began art studies at Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa, and found that it assisted him with the technical aspects as a painter, but muffled his work conceptually. As a result he decided to leave the institution, and found himself drawn to other artists with whom he found an affinity. Collectively they formed a studio called M’Pongo which offered a space for them to share ideas and exhibit together, molding their own styles that were plugged into the electricity of their city, and inserting this into the Fine Art space.

    Individually, Kamuanga Ilunga zones in on the socioeconomic, political and cultural alterations that have taken place in DRC since colonialism. He has created work that unpacks the nuances around the impact of modernity on cultural groupings, and the way in which people in Kinshasa are negotiating change and tradition.

    DRC is one of the largest exporters of coltran, a raw material necessary for the production of computers and cellphones. Kamuanga Ilunga makes reference to this visually through a stylized mimicry of a circuit board painted across the skin and backgrounds of his images. This also has the effect of placing his work, his city and the people he depicts in his paintings within the context of globalization, signifying its overpowering consequences. In his latest series, Fragile Responsibility, we see this motif used as the skin for the figures, while cloth, hats, suspenders, lace table covers, and porcelain objects tap into the history of the Kongo Kingdom, and the exchanges that took place with colonial traders. In this work Kamuanga Ilunga pays tribute to the slaves and ancestors who resisted the human trafficking. The figures appear somber and mournful, with their heads hanging low and cloth barely hanging on to their bodies, symbolically pointing to the loss of life and de-centering of African cultures through colonialism and the condition of coloniality.

    To check out more of Kamuanga Ilunga’s works visit his Instagram.

  • We are data mines

    We are data mines

    Brands, research institutes and related companies are mining our own species for data. The everyday human is consciously and unconsciously being used as an instrument in the branding and information machine, reproducing a “consensual hallucination” in which data may be visualised, heard and felt (Stone 1991: unknown page). Stone uses this term to refer to virtual reality, however it seems easily applicable to our current state of existence.

    The kinds of brands we wear say something about who we are, making our purchases identity signifiers and constructors of specific kinds of bodies. The placement of brands on bodies by wearers becomes a source of information. They become social, cultural and economic indicators.

    Combined with this, our behaviour, interactions, the content we produce, the calls we make and texts we send add to our position as data mines. The body and the mind continue to be framed as independent operators with aspects that can be isolated for closer inspection, in the name of better customer experience or getting to know what the consumer wants, often before we even know what we want.

    Even the devices we use to engage with the virtual are produced by the interfaces and programs designed by brands, curating specific experiences and imagined futures. People often take these devices and applications and construct their own uses for them, sometimes redirecting their intended purpose, but always limited by the parameters set out in code and hardware.

    Companies are using location data, watching where and how we conduct ourselves. Brands no longer need to interact with our physical presence to collect this information. The coded you is all that matters, and this is the data that is increasingly being mined by companies to predict trends and create campaigns. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal is a recent moment that highlights the reality of this, affecting 87 million users.

    An image of you already exists through tags, internet searches, information uploaded on apps and GPS locations. Our digital footprints and the traces we leave in virtual space are being woven together by brands, resulting in a frightening, generic yet familiar reflection of ourselves being presented back to us. How is it that adverts that pop up online are able to be connected to the conversation I had with a friend over the phone? Is this coded, simulated version of me that is constructed through my digital footprint infiltrating my consciousness to tell future me what I should purchase and how I should interact?

    The body and the mind create data, and the way in which this data is mined and the way in which this information is used is threatening the future of the biological human body. The boundaries between technology and nature continue to collapse, and the information from the body is being used to find ways to correct its imperfections and fragilities, removing its nature from its future. Info about the mind is preserved to keep some form of humanity, while trying to create artificial bodies that can house this information.

    “The illusion will be so powerful you won’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s not” – Steve Williams

    Stone (1991) mentioned that it is interesting that at a time when the last of the “real world” anthropological field sites are disappearing, a new kind of field opened up. That of the online field – a space where meeting face-to-face has mutated definitions of “meet” and “face” (1991: unknown page). She highlights how these spaces have sped up the collapsing of the boundaries between nature and technology, biology and the machine, the natural and the artificial, as explained by posthuman theorists. These spaces are part of new social forms which she describes as virtual systems (Stone 1991: unknown page).

    Stone presents an example of the power of these coded spaces and the new forms of interaction they have engendered through the story of Julie. Julie was an older disabled woman at a online conference in New York in 1985 who operated her computer with a headstick. The personality she projected online was huge, creating computer-mediated connections with people online who viewed her as a friend to confide in about intimate information. Here, her disability was invisible and irrelevant. Years after the online conference participants found out that Julie did not exist. Turns out “she” was a middle aged male psychiatrist who had spent weeks creating a believable persona. Accidentally starting up a conversation with a woman who mistook him for a woman when logged on to the conference, he was entranced by the vulnerability, complexity and openness that these women expressed online. Once the real life truth behind Julie was exposed, the women who had confided in her expressed various levels of anger and hurt from this trickery. While this story comes across as a triggering and chaotic episode of MTV’s Catfish, it points to a dimension outside of the transformed nature of deceit, ethics and risk. This dimension is the beginning of an un-embodied existence.

    Stone’s paper Will the real body please stand up (1991), among other discussions, highlights how the internet, virtual reality and machines have mutated concepts like distance, inside/outside, and even the physical body, emphasising how these concepts are increasingly taking on “new and frequently disturbing meanings”. The story reveals how the coded persona can take on a life of its own, creating new forms of interaction within this virtual dispensation. What is more striking is how this demonstrates how the discursive and visual dynamics of these digitally constructed spaces make grounding a person in a physical human body meaningless (Stone 1991). If interaction and relationships can form without the necessity of the human body, and the fact that all that we do and all that we are is treated as data, then the idea of existing without the biological human body does not seem like such a far-fetched idea.

    A life produced. A life un-embodied.

    “If anything can be ‘produced’ then it can no longer be accepted as a fact of nature” (Stone 1991: unknown page).

    From the construction of personas and interactions mediated by computers to being viewed as data, all of this connects to the idea presented by transhumanists – the idea that the mind can exist and function properly independent of the human body (Bostrom 2003). Transhumanists cling dearly to this idea of substrate-independence. This arises from framing the mind as information that can be uploaded and transferred between hosts provided that they have the computational power to do this. This reference to “mental states [being able to] supervene on any of a broad class of physical substrates” has been adopted by biomedical and technological researchers and developers. Overtime there have been companies and institutes gearing towards the creation of computational structures and processes for artificial “bodies” that will be able to host the conscious experiences of the mind.

    The context within which these developments take place are that of environmental destruction, disease, wanting to live longer and the desire to see how far we can push science and technology.

    Reflections on the ways in which we have accelerated negative environmental scenarios, combined with desires to live longer and eliminate diseases and genetic “malfunctions”, has led to biotechnologists, geneticists, biochemists and businessmen using these visions of a dystopian future to brand risky enhancements, artificial bodies, and their ideas for a new phase in humanity as beneficial, necessary and inevitable. Geneticist and businessman Craig Venter is well-known for mapping the first human genome in 2000, for his synthetic genome experiments as well as for emphasising how we must manipulate our genes in order to survive. He has recently taken it upon himself to decode death, believing that he is able to discover diseases dormant in seemingly healthy individuals. People can pay for these genetic tests at Human Longevity, where Venter is the executive chairman and head of scientific strategy. This health firm aims to stay ahead of illness and aging, and is described by Venter as a company that is a “good detective…making discoveries, not diagnoses”. Again we see how data collection is conveniently marketed as a necessary preemptive measure, but with genetic manipulation the end goal – reconstructing the very blueprint of the biological human body.

    Venter is not the only one looking to edit and rewrite the human genome, with researchers discovering CRISPR Cas9, a programmable modular complex that can be directed to target and cut specified DNA sequences, allowing for the possibility of repurposing different kinds of cells, editing the genome.

    The above are painted as positive mutations, either masking the companies backing this research, or presenting the companies as good fairies. These enhancements and adjustments are branded in the same way one would brand products, with an emphasis on how they can benefit people now and how they should be viewed as investments for the future.

    Taking this a step further, there have been predictions that the earth will be uninhabitable for humans and most other life forms in their current state by the year 2045. David Russel Schilling wrote in a 2016 article that “The only hope for humans to survive is to create robots that don’t need oxygen or fresh water to survive. Over the next three decades, technology will likely allow robots and the human mind to merge”. With this prediction, groups of humans who are able to afford these procedures will live in a post human era.

    The 2045 Strategic Social Initiative has put together a manifesto and videos, highlighting the need for these artificial bodies and the transferring of human consciousness, framing this as an improvement on human life.

    “People will make independent decisions about the extension of their lives and the possibilities for personal development in a new body after the resources of the biological body have been exhausted…Using a neural-interface humans will be able to operate several bodies of various forms and sizes remotely”

    This quote demonstrates a kind of cybernetic immortality, which is visualised and being funded by businessmen such as Russia’s Dmitry Itskov.  Here we see agency being used as a branding tool, pointing to the possibility of curating ones own experiences through these “bodies”. We may soon have to imagine a life where we choose the service provider of our artificial tool to experience the world, whether this be a computer, a body that attempts to mimic the human body as we know it today or some other kind of extended, produced body. It could be as simple as a paying for a cellphone contract today.

    It is the year 2060. The chronological destination for the new humanity. We have managed to figure out a way to unfreeze and bring back to life those who chose cryogenic freezing. Research teams have developed multiple models that can be used as portable and moveable bodies for those who wish to experience the world through those of their ancestors. AI creatures are our friends and everything is downloadable, uploadable and transferrable, including our very personas. The use of the word human now references the second last being on the well-known evolutionary diagram. Looking for a body is like creating a Sim, with less emphasis on hair, eyes, or skin but on computational ability, processing power and minimal disruptions.

    The dystopian future is being used as a branding tool, justifying the use of people today and possible artificial bodies of the future as data mines. These artificial bodies will still be operated through the parameters set out by the companies that design and develop them, continuing the thread that we can be used as data mines.

    Considering that this research is being conducted within a specific social, cultural and geopolitical moment, these technologies will carry traces of how we frame ideas related to  betterment, enhancement and enjoyable ways to live in the world established today. More specifically, they will preserve the agendas of the companies and research institutes developing these technologies today, and the lineage they will create in this future.

    Regardless of how transhumanists try to frame our future selves, it cannot escape from the fact that researchers funded by companies are the ones who will propel us into this human-engineered phase of evolution. When reading between the lines, this is a kind of escapism. An escape from disease, age, death, politics and other fragilities that come with the current human existence. It is about making these constructed fantasies more than an experience with an Oculus, but one in which we live. A hyperreal, consensual hallucination that is built on data to be collated and uploaded for a transhuman future.

    References

    Bostrom, N. (2003). “Are you living in a computer simulation?”

    “Cybernetic Immortality”: How to live forever as a robot

    Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle

    Facebook scandal hit ’87 million users’

    Genome Pioneer Craig Venter is trying to decode death

    Stone, A. R. (1991), “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?” in Cyberspace: First Steps. (ed.) Benedikt, M.

    The Way to Survive in 2045 May Be In Artificial Bodies

    What if we could rewrite the human genome?

    With Privacy Changes, Instagram Upsets Influencer Economy

    Credits

    Concept & Research Paper: Christa Dee

    Photography: Jamal Nxedlana & Lex Trickett

    Creative Direction: Jamal Nxedlana

    MUA: Orli Oh 

    3D rendering: Lex Trickett

    Product Design: Chloe Hugo Hamman

    Research Assistant: Marcia Elizabeth

  • ‘Trauma & Identity’ Group Exhibition at Gallery One11 by the NJE Collective

    ‘Trauma & Identity’ Group Exhibition at Gallery One11 by the NJE Collective

    The NJE Collective‘s latest group exhibition opened at Gallery One11 last night and has as its focus its Womxn contributors and the themes intrinsic in their practice incited by the current realities in Namibia on a political, socio-economic and cultural level.

    In discussion with a member of the group, Jo Rogge, she expresses that ‘Trauma & Identity’ relates to individual and collective realities that Namibian citizens are faced with in a time when Namibia suffers under immense poverty, rife corruption, gender violence, unemployment and the depletion of national resources amongst other factors.  Jo adds that, “…the queer space while dynamic, remains a vulnerable target for random hate-speech and physical assault.”

    The participating artists for the exhibition include Jo Rogge, Masiyaleti Mbewe, Tuli Mekondjo, Silke Berens, Tangeni Kauzuu and Hildegard Titus. The artists engage in equivocal concerns founded on personal as well as political experiences. The experiences addressed include gender and cultural identity, nationhood, belonging and recognition. Jo explains, “This exhibition encapsulates the diversity and complexity of individual and collective narratives as witnessed through the lens of each artist, drawing on either historical or current narratives.” Artworks that will be featured will include photographs, paintings, installation, and mixed media works.

    The relevance of this discourse within a South African gallery space is elaborated on by Jo as, “Namibia’s history is closely aligned with that of SA with the SADF having fought a bloody war against SWAPO on its northern borders from 1966 until prior to Independence in 1990. The post-colonial space is darkened with the lingering shadows of the apartheid system and racism. Unlike South Africa, Namibia has never seen the need for a process of reconciliation and there is a lot of unresolved trauma and pain in the national consciousness.”

    ‘Onde ku hole’, oil on canvas, 2018 by Jo Rogge

    NJE Collective, formerly known as SoNamibia, decided to change their collective name in order to embrace multilocality as a means to evade issues concerning nationality that is regarded as patriarchal and exclusive.

    Members of NJE Collective are either invited to take part in a specific exhibition or approach the collective themselves to become members of the group. The collective’s fluid membership means that members remain active by choice. Currently, the collective has eight practicing members.

    * NJE functions under its own management, towards shared goals. It is also a space for mentoring, peer support and sharing resources. Meetings take place individually as well as in a group format in order to discuss topics of common interest, creative practice, and the potential for collaboration.

    Come and support the work of these Womxn artists whose show will run at Gallery One11 until the 28th April 2018.

    ‘Collateral Damage’, oil on canvas, 2018 by Silke Berens

  • Patti Anahory // cross-disciplinary contemplations about urban imaginaries

    Born on a ship on the way to São Tomé and Príncipe, Patti Anahory lived there for 7 years before being raised in Cabo Verde. She ventured off to the US to do her undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture. Throughout her studies Anahory maintained a desire to locate her work and sites of inquiry in and about Africa. This was initially a challenge as her formal architecture education offered little flexibility with regards to the content that could be explored as a student. At the end of her undergraduate education at the Boston Architecture College she won a travelling scholarship that allowed her to spend a month in South Africa. She later went to Princeton University to complete her graduate studies and Anahory began to direct her academic pursuits towards the continent. Her thesis project focused on Dakar, Senegal.

    This required Anahory to present loaded justifications to demonstrate why African cities should be viewed as legitimate sites for research within architectural academic programs. Her persistence continued to motivate her until she was awarded the prestigious Rotch Traveling Scholarship in 2000 through a two-stage architecture design competition. From this she was able to visit cities in East and West Africa. This was a significant moment for her, as she was still on the search for thematics that were able to unpack social, cultural and geo-political understandings of African cities. It also presented her with the opportunity to affirm that African cities are legitimate sites of inquiry. Anahory explains the significance of this by stating that around 2000 there were only a few architects engaging with African cities from this vantage point, or at least few getting recognized for doing so. “So you start to see your work as a political act because it was so out of the mainstream ways of looking into architecture, and modes of knowledge production about architecture,” she explains.

    Reflecting on the attitudes of the scholarship committee for the competition Anahory shares that, “they just could not understand the production of space and architectural critical thinking as a contemporary issue in Africa.” Her choice to explore East and West African countries allowed for a moment of rupture from her formal architectural education which did not place any emphasis on the contemporary conditions of the African city. After over a year of travelling she had to return to New York and worked as a freelance architect. A few years later her home country called her back.

    She was offered the opportunity to help setup a multidisciplinary research centre at Cabo Verde’s first public university. This presented an exciting challenge to setup an agenda for the relevant issues relating to the Cabo Verde built environment. This was a joint effort with her colleague Andreia Moassab at the centre with whom she shared similar interests in postcolonial studies, decolonising knowledge within the field of architecture as well as an exploration of how to think about development strategies and appropriate paradigms.

    While serving as director at the research centre, Anahory co-founded an art collective called XU:Collective with Andreia, who was  research coordinator, and Salif Diallo Silva, who was responsible for the research group on design and territory. “We decided we want to create a parallel practice that would allow us more freedom and a different language from scientific research and academic institutionalized setting, to speak about things such as environmental and social justice. Things we were addressing at the university but in a different way. In many ways the university and the collective informed each other,” she explains. An artistic language also allowed a different way to engage with society and to reach a larger public.

    When responding to my question about her views on architecture, urban planning and development on the continent, she expressed that rethinking new paradigms on all levels is important. This also involves how we can contribute more to cities and more sustainable development. “We also need to think and speculate about what future we want, and what kind of theoretical basis we want to produce. There are those of us carefully thinking about what kind of practice we want. Architecture is not only about producing buildings and objects, but also about critically thinking about our contemporary moment,” she explains.

    Due to this Anahory, like many others, has to take on multiple roles to tackle the double burden of contributing to an intellectual discourse while presenting a shift in what is seen as knowledge and how it is produced. “You have to be acting in so many realms in order to feel like you are making a change or contributing towards something,” she expresses.

    Working on curating her independent practice, Anahory continues to invest in urban activism and advocacy.  “I can only try to contribute to a more just city. And our cities and our models for development are very much imported from outside an in a neoliberal logic.” This is done through projects with young urban activists, specifically in neighbourhoods that have been neglected in terms of physical and social infrastructure.

    Considering that African Mobilities is a platform that offers multiple avenues for contemplating city-ness and all its associates (identity, culture, physical and social infrastructure, etc.), the inclusion of Anahory in the Praia Exchange made sense considering her experience in having to justify the exploration of contemporary Africa outside of the framework set out by western epistemological agendas.

    From the get go the participants bonded over questioning the terminology of “Lusophone” Africa, (as with “Francophone” and “Anglophone”) and the imaginaries they invoke. Anahory, speaking from an island perspective, and highlighting the ambiguous relationship Cabo Verde has with the rest of the continent, was able to present how our collective imaginaries from these labels craft our identities and place us closer or further apart. Drawing on the parallels between Luanda and Praia, cross-disciplinary investigations and conversations opened up new questions and debates.

    Anahory will be coming to South Africa again this year as a visiting research fellow at University of Johannesburg. Perhaps the Praia Exchange has offered a point of departure for the time she will spend here.