Tag: virtual reality

TMRW Gallery // An Encoded Creation Merging Pixels and Paintbrushes

In an ever-increasing digital age where modes of technology seep into everyday use, TMRW Gallery operates as a platform at the frontier of innovation. Rooted in the desire to extend knowledge and experience – the objectives of the space are to produce world-class work and promote South Africa as a thought leader. Its core focus is invested is the integration of contemporary art and technology.

Director Ann Roberts describes the space as, “platform agnostic” emphasizing that TMRW Gallery is open to engaging with artists of all disciplines. The contemporary art space pairs both emerging and established artists with technologists who collaborate in actualizing a creative vision. Based on the premise that art guides and dictates the process by pushing the technology, creating a context in which “innovation is exponential.”

The gallery provides artists with access to new technologies including virtual reality, 3D printing, performance and augmented reality. This allows them to explore the medium and incorporate it as an extension of their practice – “tech is just another paintbrush”. Ann notes that “the outcomes need to be flexible” in order to allow for the plasticity of the process.

The not-for-profit space also presents an alternate gallery model, whereby the creation of exceptional work and not salability is the primary focus. However, the space is dependent on sponsorship and brand association. TMRW Gallery also poses an alternative to the ‘White Cube’ space – opting for a far more engaging and immersive environment.

The space promotes an audience-driven experience in which viewers are captivated and engulfed in an imagined reality. This model operates as an opportunity to develop the visual and digital vocabulary of its audience members – making the work intergenerationally accessible. The gallery’s upcoming show exhibits in September, featuring Lady Skollie and Wayne Barker. In the future, the space will also engage with extensive public programming, residencies, as well as group and solo shows.

14 August 2018
Delphine Diallo’s ‘Women of New York’ – empowering women

Delphine Diallo, currently based in Brooklyn, New York, is a French Senegalese photographer and visual artist. Completing her studies at the Académie Charpentier School of Visual Art in Paris she worked in the music industry as a graphic designer, special effect motion artist and video editor before moving to New York to explore her own practice.

Combining her artistry with activism Delphine momentums various possibilities for the empowerment of women, cultural minorities and youth forward. The mediums in which she practices include both analogue and digital photography, illustration and collage, virtual reality and 3D printing.

Her arresting imagery acts to challenge societal norms and champion women with mythological, anthropological, sexuality, identity and race explorations.

Delphine’s project Women of New York makes use of classic portraiture to create visibility. For this project, she photographed women and girls of New York which was compiled into a book format and featured 111 females (a symbol of oneness).

For this project, the artist used the method of blind casting via Instagram posts and having her assistant handle the model calls in order to rule out discrimination and limiting women and girls who want to participate from forming a part of the project.

“I feel like if I select women, then I’m discriminating against other women who want to participate. I’m not going to do that. So, my assistant handles the model calls I post on Instagram, and 30 women might reply, and because they’ve expressed interest, they are part of this project.

I want to give each woman who has felt defeated, unprotected, ignored or degraded, a new light to shine on her brilliance and beauty. And, for the women who have always felt empowered, despite society dismissing her in the workplace, educational institutions, media outlets, and even in her home, I want Women of New York to illuminate her strength in ways she may never have imagined.” she expressed in an interview with 99u.

Delphine’s images are strong and show these women and girls in a confident, powerful light. Her project has created visibility and a face that speaks to what it means to be a female in New York today. Her work holds power in that it celebrates beauty and is a clear indication that womanhood cannot be seen as an embodiment of one way of being.

29 June 2018
‘Trembling Thought’ – a solo exhibition in Katharien de Villiers’ studio

An amalgamation of colour, image, sound and installation. An artist’s studio showcases a new body of work Trembling Thought presented by SMITH Studio. The meeting of traditional and non-traditional media. A world built from Katharien de Villiers’ memory and curated by her hand. As if walking on to an 80’s sci-fi film set. Small animals glare through luminous eye slits. The viewer is asked to engage with work through various entry points.

The expansive new body of work takes interest in uncertainty and virtual reality. The nucleus of Trembling Thought is that of the instability of memory. The show itself is described by the artist as “A recorded library of warped memory”.

Creating from her own memory, the unreliable nature of one’s own recollections is celebrated. In uncertainty, she finds multiplicity and potential. In Trembling Thought De Villiers acts in order to materialise both the desires and power structures prevalent in the reproduction of memory.

I spoke to the artist to reveal more about her process and thought behind the new body of work:

Process and the audience’s engagement/dissection of process is of prevalence in this body of work. Why is it so important?

As an artist, I have always been acutely aware of my disengagement from work by the time it is put on show for viewers. In this awareness I try to create spaces within which viewers can find their own entrance points in the work, allowing them to build a personal relationship with the work independent of my artistic intention, but within the spatial elements of my truth and curation.

In your artist bio it is stated that thinking is broader than the work itself. How do works and concepts correlate? Do they not carry the same amount of weight? Are artworks then a tool to access the thought conveyed?

Saying thinking is broader than the work itself is just another jab at the overwhelming process of creating works which can live beyond a singular intention. I wouldn’t call the work “tools”, since somehow that in itself designates purpose and outcome. The artworks serve as elements which can be placed in different relations to one another, form new combinations of thought and generate a multitude of rational conclusions. The works become to thought what letters are to words; when placed in new combinations meaning can be altered in the blink of an eye.

Is Virtual Reality employed as a way to speak about uncertainty?

The new understanding of virtual reality speaks of an artificiality which is not applicable to this body of work. This is a more personal version of virtual reality. Personal memories and first-hand experiences make up the content of “Trembling Thought”. It is the forced nature of the elements’ relationship in the works, the surreal scale and shifting perspectives that initiate the sense of uncertainty which ultimately guides the viewer through a trembling world of forced relations.

What is this potential that is found in uncertainty and warped memory?

Potential in as much as the outcome of thought in relation to the work is not designated or pre-destined. The viewers find themselves confronted with my memories, memories which have already started cross-breeding and hybridizing with other experiences and memories of my own. The potential and uncertainty exists in the very nature of these memories and memory’s natural inclination to bend, break and form new truths.

The new body of work has a self-reflexive quality. How do you think audience members will be able to identify with this personal project?

“Trembling Thought” expects a huge amount of engaging energy from the viewer. Through the process of curation, I wanted to amplify the feeling of a labyrinth, or that the viewer is in fact strolling through my mind. As an artist, I have never quite been able to create beyond personal experience. It would seem arbitrary to speak in a voice that isn’t my own. The viewers greatest power lies in their ability to respond to visual stimulus and relate from an individual perspective and personal archive of memory.

Please unpack what is meant by “…to materialise the desires and power structures at play while we reproduce memory.”? What are these power structures and desires and why and how would memory be reproduced?

Memory, in my opinion, has a morphing hierarchy, which is informed by desire. Desire is ultimately what drives memory to discard or accumulate. In a way memory’s ability to organically grow, shrink and generally change shape makes it its own reproductive system – I was simply the catalyst in the physical rendering of these thoughts.

Dualities seem to be of much importance. Could you please elaborate on this?

The doubling of elements (such as fat cops or snarling dogs) is a mental process of visualization. Repeating elements becomes a way of engaging with the hierarchy of memory and the potential of repeating elements in new combinations. Duality could of course also refer to both physical and emotive contrast in the works.

Does the work Kinetic Window attempt to make a commentary on the physicality of modern art and where it is found spatially?

‘Kinetic Window’ is an exploration of the Post-modern obsession with meaning and understanding in art. I often feel that viewers expect a conclusive emotional or intellectual understanding of art and the accompanying sound piece elaborates on this concern. It is problematic for viewers to expect understanding if they refuse to engage with works from their personal archive of knowledge.

Trembling Thought was presented as a one-night art event in the Artist’s studio showcasing an elaborate body of work. The show included new paintings and a number of moving installations as seen earlier this year at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. The event took place on the 14^th of June, however, the artist is available for studio visits in the month after the show to discuss her process and take collectors through her work.

20 June 2018
Artist and researcher Salome Asega on multivocality, dissensus and a speculative lens

As an artist and a researcher, Salome Asega‘s practice is a celebration of multivocality and dissensus. The relationship between her practice as an artist, and her roles as a researcher and teacher, is an interconnected one. Each of these aspects inform and filter into one another. Asega explains that this connection comes from their collective ability to offer useful methods for igniting questions and picking through ideas. I interviewed Asega to find out more about her work.

Could you please share more about your creative and academic background?

I spent a year after finishing my undergrad degree tinkering with hardware and making interactive visuals for my friends in performance and music. This eventually brought me to a community of artists who were also working with technology in exploratory ways. I did an MFA at Parsons at The New School in Design and Technology, where I’m now a faculty member.

I also come from a family of science and math people. When my family bought our first computer, my uncle, who was studying computer science at the time, used to mail me floppy discs of games he was working on. I don’t think I understood this as a creative technology practice at the time, but I like to thank him now for jump starting my infatuation with all things digital.

In your bio you describe your practice as one that “celebrates dissensus and multivocality”. Could you please unpack why this is the foundation of your practice, and how you filter this through in your textual and visual projects?

So many of my projects involve a collaborative or participatory process, which is grounded in conversations where we are making certain conceptual or design decisions. This very messy, messy process is sometimes rendered invisible when what’s in an exhibition is a final art object. When I say I celebrate multivocality or dissensus/consensus, I’m saying I value the process of working in community and I also acknowledge that it’s not easy.

Having looked through your ongoing project, POSSESSION and your recent participation in the group exhibition To Break The Ocean, it appears that water is of particular interest to you, specifically the historical and cultural significance of water and its connection to Blackness and the African Diaspora. Could you please share more about your interest in this, and how you unpack this in POSSESSION and To Break The Ocean?

I grew up in the desert, so I think the water is a natural draw for me. Beyond that, I’m curious about the ways the ocean and water show up in visual representations of time like how the ocean can represent the kalunga line in West African cosmologies. The ocean then becomes the split between cycles of past, present, and future, and also different dimensions– real world, spirit world. There is a speculative lens in much of my work and water presents itself as a material to do this thinking.

Your participation in the group exhibition To Break The Ocean is with Iyapo Repository. Could you please share more about the idea behind this resource library and how it has evolved since its inception?

Ayodamola Okunseinde and I started Iyapo Repository in 2016 during a residency with Eyebeam, an organization here in New York. The project has so many entry points for us. We were thinking a lot about the rising number of e-waste sites on the continent and the ways we’ve seen folks repurpose those materials to make something new and beautiful. We were also thinking about the places we show up in mainstream science fiction narratives, and black folks are primarily shown as extras if they’re even shown at all. We were also thinking about access and literacy to digital tools, and how we could leverage our access to certain institutional spaces to bring resources out. Somehow we combed all these questions and concerns together and developed a pop-up resource library and workshop series that asks participants to build future artifacts with us using hardware, virtual reality, and some digital fabrication techniques. It’s been extremely energizing to take up space in speculative futures with other black people.

Iyapo Repository focuses on physical and digital “artifacts”. Why was it important for you to include both kinds of artefacts? And how have you collated these to ensure their value and meaning to not get stripped away when placed in the context of a collection/archive?

Our inclusion to have both physical and digital artifacts in the repository was to ensure we were designing for multiple methods of engagement. We can dream up and create artifacts with our participants remotely, but also also in real life. The engagements, conversations, and creative exchanges are what ultimately make up this project. I’m interested in getting folks to speculate and design collectively.

When we show the artifacts in an exhibition, we include the original manuscript drawings and writing done in the workshop to provide contextual evidence for the final object. These documents are signed by our participants to make sure they are given credit as the archivist who “discovered” the artifact.

Could you please share more about the Iyapo Repository and how participants become archivists influenced by how they imagine the future? Who participates in these workshops?

We partner with museums, universities, festivals, community organizations, and after school programs to host us. I’m always thinking about how we can make unlikely partnerships to redistribute resources from one place to another. So if we’re working in a larger institution I want to make sure we’re also partnering with a community organization who can bring in their networks to participate in the project with us and take ownership of Iyapo Repository in that iteration.

The project Level Up: The Real Harlem Shake is also interesting in its use of video game language and interaction. Please share more about the choice to develop this as a video game? Is this a kind of commentary on cultural appropriation, digital cross-dressing or identity tourism?

In 2012, DJ Baur came out with a song called “Harlem Shake” that prompted people to make viral videos of them and a group of friends shaking wildly. Soon these videos took the top hit position over videos of the original Harlem Shake meaning you’d have to do some deep internet digging to find the original dance. I worked with curator Ali Rosa-Salas and dancer Chrybaby Cozie to develop a project that could counter this cultural erasure and assert the Harlem Shake as a dance form that is studied, learned, and passed off to others.

You are also the co-host of speculative talk show Hyperopia: 20/30 Vision. Please share more about the show and how it connects to the other work that you do?

Hyperopia: 20/30 Vision is a radio show Carl Chen (Lasik) and I (ConVex) started in 2015 at bel-air radio. Derek Schultz (DJ D) and Leila Tamari (LENZ) joined shortly after. The show originally was a way for us to ask experts to speculate the near future of their fields. Each episode, we want to imagine some essential element of a future — alternative economies, reproductive health, sustainable architecture, etc — and the ways technology creates opportunities or challenges towards the visioning. The format changed slightly for us to also have conversations as a team about our anxieties and optimisms around technological development presently. This show is another way think through ideas of futurity collectively.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m currently a Technology Fellow at the Ford Foundation evaluating the arts and cultural strategies through technology lens. I’m spending the summer writing and reading in preparation for new projects this fall.

Is there anything you have lined up for this year that you would like to share with our readers?

I have a residency with Pioneer Works in Brooklyn lined up for this fall. I’m also working with Geng (PTP) to produce a performance for Abrons Art Center at St Augustine’s Church in November. We’re pulling a group of artists together to think through the architectural history of this Church that tells an early history of segregation in New York.

Photography by Naima Green

1 June 2018
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

26 April 2018
Is Algorithm the new Abstract?

Watching the contemporary art scene evolve is a little bit like watching a sports game as a complete philistine with no knowledge of the rules. You can’t really tell who the star player is, you’re definitely not sure where the ball is going to go, you have no conception of what is allowed or not allowed, and just when you think you’ve gotten the grips of it, something unexpected happens and it is all upended.

As with so many fields, technology has infiltrated the contemporary art scene. So just as you thought you were beginning to understand the Tracey Emin’s, the Ai Wei Wei’s, the Nicholas Hlobo’s, the Nandipha Mntambo’s, the art world threw you a curve-ball in the shape of the algorithm.

Now I would like to think I am no novice when it comes to art but ask me about coding or Java or (I can’t even think of another word to put here) then I am stumped. As long as I can open my emails and post instastories then I don’t need to know. It is like that time old saying – “If you love something, don’t find out how it is made.” But now, the foreign language of programming is seeping into my perfect little contemporary art comfort zone, and I might need to start learning the rules.

Ellsworth Kelly – Spectrum Colours arranged by chance III. 1951

So as every good writer and researcher in the 21^st century does, I went straight to Google (Ironically using its complex algorithms). Google told me that an algorithm was a “set of rules, or a process used in calculations or other problem-solving operations.” I mean if I’m honest, this didn’t help me much. As a society that are more attached to our devices than perhaps could ever have been predicted. Something that has always resonated with me was the video produced in 2015 of Otis Johnson, who had been released from prison after 44 years of incarceration. In this short interview with Al Jazeera, he gets off the subway at Times Square and is immediately bewildered by what he first thought was everyone talking to themselves but turned out to be what we all know to be FaceTime. It was the first moment where I sat and really considered how detached from reality we really are.

Each step on a Fitbit, each 4am tweet, each calorie counted, or song downloaded is being controlled by that terrifyingly foreign language of code. Plebs like myself see 0s and 1s, and lots of disruptive / and ? and * and [ ] – yet the next generation contemporary artist is seeing infinite possibilities.

Screenshot from selected/deleted/populated/isolated – cities in the global south, 2016 by Carly Whitaker

Take Laurie Frick, a New York based artist, who has used various data-trackers to create large-scale representations of ‘self.’ In 2012, using the app Moodjam, Frick tracked her emotions and moods over the course of several days and then created works like the one below as visual articulations of this data. At first glance we see work akin to the mid-century minimalists Sol LeWitt, or Ellsworth Kelly. Closer to home, Johannesburg’s Carly Whitaker’s Selected/Deleted/Populated/Isolated from 2016 uses collected, collated data to consider the representation of ‘other’ and uses Photoshop to disrupt and distort Google map images to create connections between cities in the global south. Each of these examples reflects on how digital data can lead to the abstraction or reorganisation of information.

And so, I ask, has the new artistic tech-evolution redefined the abstract?

Now that the digital age has permeated so much of our daily activity, how do we, as consumers of art, consider its permeation into the galleries? A large part of this new age of art seems to reflect on digital as disruptive. We see the background interfaces of the world wide web or distorted virtual realities – the relatively comfortable spaces of Google, Facebook and Instagram are discarded for the more uneasy abstract depths of the internet. Artists seem to be playing with the very ‘physicality of art’ – algorithms are used to create sketches that seem made of the human hand (See Jon McCormack’s Niche Constructions for example,or more fragmented abstract video works (like those of Casey Reas, or Diego Collado), or play with the developing technologies of virtual and augmented reality (See Blocked Content by the Russian collective Recycle Group or the work by Paul McCarthy and Christian Lemme.

While some of the Western world thinks we still ride elephants in South Africa, our digital artists are in their own way coming of age – spurred on by innovative spaces like the Centre for the Less Good Idea who had a Virtual Reality exhibition last year, and the annual Fak’ugesi festival that celebrates the rise of African digital innovation.

CUSS Group – New Horizons Installation Shot. 2016

Two years ago, I went to the New Horizons exhibition presented by the CUSS group at the Stevenson, and left feeling bewildered. As one expects when they see life-size pixelated dog statues, couches floating in Dali-esque, virtual waters and photoshopped couples superimposed into neon-blue digitally rendered nightclubs that look like the infamous Avastar (may it RIP). Were they considering the banality of the internet, the superficiality and excess of capitalist culture, the absurdity of digital programmes like photoshop and the constructed ‘realities’ they create, or perhaps they were just commenting on society’s gluttonous consumption of the ‘digital dream.’

Part of what the age of the algorithm means is that the digital is inescapable. Even Home Affairs uses computers these days. And as artists begin to consider the complexities of this omnipresent and opaque technology, we as viewers need to be prepared to confront a new abstract.

CUSS Group – New Horizons Installation Shot. 2016

Many contemporary South African artists are transcending the boundary of the screen or page and using 3D ‘collages’ to juxtapose the virtual with the corporeal. At the Post African Futures exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in 2015, Pamela Sunstrum and Thenjiwe Nkosi created a visual cacophony, Notes from the Ancients, and used installation to contrast the now all too familiar motherboard, with 3D printed masks mirrored on ‘traditional’ African artefacts, murals of mine-dump sand dunes, and defunct technology. This type of disruptive installation makes us constantly try to construct connections, to create some type of linear understanding. Frequently we are left dissatisfied, or with so many ideas spinning in our head we feel dizzy.

Tabita Rezaire’s Exotic Trade of 2017, also exhibited at the Goodman Gallery, considered the erasure of black womxn from the “dominant narrative of technological achievement” (Rezaire 2017) and how much of scientific advancement has capitalised from the ‘availability’ of the black body. The juxtaposition of images from African spirituality, the ‘glitchy’ virtual world, the jarring electric pink gynaecologist examination table, and the omnipotent, frequently ‘sexualised’ or ‘maternalised’ black womxn body are jarring reminders of the darker side of the digital arena. The motherboardby name reiterates the ‘mother earth’, maker of all – but disrupts the notion of the natural by the ubiquitous computer. We are confronted with a maze of imagery, that traverses the boundaries of the body, and technology itself.

As we begin to adjust to a new abstract, I ask – “where to from here?”

Tabita Rezaire – Sugar Walls Teardom, 2016 from Exotic Trade

20 March 2018
Virtual Reality // disembodied identities and experiences

The development of virtual reality technology has been making its way into the art world in recent years, with a new generation of artists beginning to produce works in this medium. Some of the these works are exclusively made for display in galleries whereas others are made accessible online. Total immersion will soon be added to future high school students’ art curriculum when discussing the elements of art.

Hardware innovations have played a crucial role in enhancing VR experiences and the possibilities of using this technology as imagined by artists. The Oculus Rift, with built in speakers and 110 degree field of view, is one such device that provides a portable way to be submerged into a digitally engineered world. For a less expensive option, the Google Cardboard made up of a kit that allows mobile devices to be inserted into a cardboard frame, is a more accessible way to experience VR technology. With these kinds of developments, our understandings of the screen have been expanded. They have also inspired museums and galleries to rethink display strategies and frameworks.

The New Museum in New York in partnership with new media archive Rhizome, took the above one step further. At the beginning of this year they opened an exhibition titled “First Look: Artists’ VR” consisting of six newly commissioned digital artworks. People were able to view these works from any Android or iOS device for free. The artworks in the exhibition made use of animation and had dreamlike, surrealist elements, with objects floating around and crashing into one another. These artworks were not responsive to viewers. They were instead a more conceptual exploration of the medium’s potential.

Painter and VR artist Rachel Rossin presented one of the more interesting contributions to the exhibition. Her work Man Mask takes aesthetic direction from the video game “Call of Duty”. However, in her work she uses distortion to make the game’s characters translucent while a woman’s voice speaks over the work. Her manipulation of the familiar is what makes her work powerful.

Still from ‘Man Mask’

This exhibition presented a new approach to curatorial frameworks, and this was guided by developments and explorations in VR technology.

Relating to the excitement surrounding VR, in 2014 artist Mark Farid planned to take residence in a London gallery for a month while becoming someone else through virtual reality. With a VR headset and noise cancelling headphones, he planned to surrender himself to a volunteer’s first person view. The volunteer wore glasses equipped with cameras, and this live recording was sent directly to Farid’s VR headset. The aim for this experiment was to discover how adaptable the brain is to another human body, as well as to delve deeper into how our sense of self is constructed/deconstructed. Feeding into how the internet and other digital worlds have arguably allowed us to create disembodied identities and experiences, VR technology has opened up questions about whether virtual embodiment may become our future(s).

9 November 2017
Alt Reality // Where art and tech meet

Alt Reality is a technology studio focused primarily on Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. The studio investigates other technology forms by looking at their ability to move into virtual reality and augmented reality. These technologies include 3D Printing and iOT data to name a few. I had an interview with Alt Reality creative technologist Rick Treweek to tell me more about the workings and history of the tech studio.

Rick has worked in mobile game and app design for the last 15 years as well as 3D printing for the last 5 years and expresses that VR and AR were the next likely steps in his career. Rick tells me that within this space of virtual reality, augmented reality and investigation, a great deal of high-level Proof Of Concepts and Projects is executed. With a love for experimentation and art the tech studio makes time to focus on this sector.

When asked about the kinds of worlds that Alt Reality creates Rick explains that by utilizing AR, VR as well as Mixed reality in amalgamation with one another, they create projects with digital overlays of real worlds in AR and building environments in VR that imitate the real world with the use of 360 cameras. “We often look at developing projects that showcase potentials of how things in the future will look once the technologies have moved away from devices and into wearables like glasses and contact lenses.”

When asked how Alt Reality started Rick tells me that their journey began started 2 years ago in the Tshimologong Precinct Makerspace. “The idea initially came when I bumped into another maker called Phathwa Senene. I was busy working on a 3D Printed VR headset and bumped into Phathwa who had also just been making a 3D Printed set. We decided to look at getting into VR specific hardware and having a background in Apps and Games it was natural to then start looking at what could be done on the software side.” Gareth Steele joined the team while they were on an IBM research project. His talents as an illustrator, designer and Creative Director took the tech studio’s software to another level. With a resilient curiosity in VR Gareth became the Creative Director of the company.

In my interview with Rick he took some time to explain tech terms to me. One of these terms that have become synonymous with tech is disruptive software and, as Rick explains, this refers to technologies that challenge rigid notions of how things should be done. An example of this is 3D Printing that challenges traditional manufacturing methods.

According to Rick a creative technologist is a person with an interest in exploring new technologies with the aim to look at new methods in which technologies can be used. Another term that circulates in the tech realm is Augmented Reality and this refers to technology that overlaps digital data on to actual reality.

When asked about their involvement with the National Maker Movement Rick expresses, “We are part of the Collective involving maker related events nationally as well as teaching skills and technologies from what’s called the 4th industrial revolution. Through conferences, talks and teaching we are exposing these technologies to a larger public audience, sharing what we have learnt to grow the sector.”

The kind of work that the studio produces is based around Research and Development, Proof of Concepts and the exploration of technologies. “We do this mainly within Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and 3D Printing, along with all the new emerging technologies around this sector.” The work that the studio produces is often showcased and utilized during events.

“We develop a lot of software within VR and AR and also develop a lot of hardware to go along with our projects, such as our 3D Printed Handle headsets. We do this through collaboration with people such as Phathwa who is an electronics and 3D Printing Ninja.” With their diverse nature the studio also works on many collaborative projects, art related activities and exhibitions.

Alt Reality has worked with IBM Research Africa, WITS, the Origins Centre, SAP, Jaguar, Accenture and Samsung. “Our main passion falls within the art sector where we are constantly exploring options in this sector and trying to figure out the monetization of this area of work…Currently one of our most exciting projects is working with William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea where we are exploring new technologies and their impact on South African Artists.”

Rick states that the vision for Alt Reality includes how they can align research and development through the merging of art and technology. “We have a vision of a technology building within the heart of Johannesburg where we can make this happen. Ideally a building with each floor focusing on new sectors within these fields such as Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality, iOT, 3D Printing, Robotics and AI. Using Art as the main driving force behind the research. Using these new discoveries, we can then look at scaling what we have learnt to make social impact projects and initiatives that could change the face of Africa. We want to show the world that South Africa, and Africa can be a technology powerhouse.”

Alt Reality’s innovation, technical expertise and love for art is pushing the way that art and technology is viewed together. They are no longer regarded as separate entities with the emergence of more and more digital artists, festivals such as Fak’ugesi and Alt Reality the barrier is being knocked down and we are moving into an era of hybridity. Rick’s aspiration to show the world what a powerhouse we are can be accomplished with virtual reality and augmented reality at their fingertips.

20 September 2017
Francois Knoetze – Escaping the Frontier

The immersive technology of virtual reality has world shaking implications. Something as small as a VR headset can destabilize the core categories of dream and flesh which make up consensual reality. With the new show Virtual Frontiers, artist Francois Knoetze is using VR to disrupt the historical categories which continue to infect contemporary South Africa with poverty and violence. Over six short films, his 360 camera maps the psychogeography of Grahamstown, and how the stark racial and social divisions in the town make it a microcosm of the country at large. The film’s wildly merge reenactments, archive footage and special effects to blur the past into the present. The follow up to his acclaimed Cape Mongo series, the new work will be premiered at this year’s National Arts festival.

Via email, Francois shared some of the themes which underpin his ambitious project

I’m fascinated by your psychogeography of Grahamstown, and the focus on the past bleeding into the present. Were there any specific historical events, or even things in your own experience, which inspired you to take this approach. And did Rhodes Must Fall also play a part for you?

Growing up during the Rainbow Era, I lapped up my fair share of the almost propaganda-like optimism that flavoured the public discourse of those years. I think my approach to making art is often informed by my distrust for neat, grand narratives. It forms part of a process of unlearning the inclination towards neat categories, binaries and conclusions.

It’s also an attempt at addressing the ahistorical nature of the Rainbow rhetoric, and how it managed to gloss over the burning question of reparations for 350 years of plundering. ‘94 was branded as an endpoint to colonialism and racism, and I think a lot of people just sort of bought it because it was convenient and colourful. The Marikana massacre showed that the government’s propensity towards militaristic death squad tactics against peacefully protesting black workers was not dissimilar to that of the Apartheid state. And movements such as Rhodes Must Fall opened my eyes to just how far South Africa still has to go in terms of restructuring institutions, syllabi, professions, and economics. We, the white minority, remain seemingly unperturbed or in denial about the dubious origins of our power and privilege, hiding behind security companies, high walls and #zumamustfalls, like the forts of yesteryear. Virtual Frontiers is in part an attempt to make sense of my position within this historical juncture by looking at the effects and systems which organise the way people experience the small, yet extremely fractured city of Grahamstown.

How do you feel the concept of the frontier impacts on post-colonial, contemporary South Africa?

I think post-coloniality is a term at odds with the lived experience of most South Africans, the structuring of its cities and its economy. Frontiers are barriers that separate, but like outer space they are also great unknown territories to be explored. I think post-coloniality is in many ways an unexplored frontier in South Africa. I think it is necessary to tear down the barriers that maintain the colonial ordering of people, commodities and spaces. I believe this would open up space for the emergence of a more inclusive society that embraces its Africanness, and doesn’t simply package a superficial version of it for tourist consumption.

What inspired the use of virtual reality, and do you feel that VR is something that is going to become more socially and politically significant in the near future?

I started experimenting with virtual reality whilst on residency in Dar es Salaam last year. For me, being able to place the viewer into immersive first-person scenarios raises fundamental questions around positionality and reconciling the giant rifts in the lived experiences of people in a place as divided as South Africa. It puts you, as the viewer, inside of the work, pushing beyond the screen so it has a raw, experiential power that pure film doesn’t. It’s the first medium that makes the leap from representation to experience. The social and political significance of an artistic medium that allows you to experience what you perceive as physical closeness is unprecedented.

4 July 2017
South African Premiere of ‘NEW DIMENSIONS – Virtual Reality Africa’

Electric South and the Goethe-Institut present the South African premiere of New Dimensions – Virtual Reality Africa, a selection of Virtual Reality productions from Kenya, Senegal and Ghana. These works will show within the Virtual Encounters section of the 2017 Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival.

With more people on the continent taking an interest in creating VR productions, Electric South is funding and incubating virtual reality and interactive media in Africa. Supported by Big World Cinema, Blue Ice Docs and the Bertha Foundation for New Dimensions, Electric South and Goethe-Institut are invested in making African artists and filmmakers part of the foundations that direct the way VR technology goes in the future.

Co-founder of Electric South and curator of Virtual Encounters, Ingrid Kopp has been a curator of interactive and immersive media at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. With this experience she has come to recognize that it is difficult for people to understand what the fuss is about when it comes to VR unless they attend a festival or exhibition. “My aim is to get people excited about what story-driven VR can do – all the different approaches and styles,” Ingrid explains. With this year’s festival taking place in Johannesburg and Cape Town, Ingrid is excited that, “more people will get a chance to see the work and I hope that it will inspire more African creators to make VR.”.

Selly Raby Kane – The Other Dakar

New Dimensions – Virtual Reality Africa offers a view of the continent’s diverse cultural landscape. Included is Ghanaian science fiction author and founder of the Afrocyberpunk website, Jonathan Dotse’s ‘Spirit Robot’. This is an exploration of the vibrant Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Accra. Viewers can also experience Kenyan photographer Ng’endo Mukii’s layered live footage and animation city poem ‘Nairobi Berries’. The surrealist work of Senegalese fashion designer Selly Raby Kane ‘The Other Dakar’ will provide attendees with a magical 360 piece in which a girl is chosen to discover the invisible Dakar. Kenya’s The Nest Collective provide a futuristic thought experiment with their interactive work ‘Let This Be A Warning’ that presents a group of Africans who have left Earth to create a colony on a distant planet.

Virtual Encounters shows from 2 to 4 June at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, and from 8 to 10 June at The American Corner (Central Library) in Cape Town.

For more information checkout the Encounters website and the Virtual Encounters event on Facebook.

Ng’endo Mukii – Nairobi Berries

26 May 2017
Daniel Rautenbach Explores Virtual Reality as a form of Hyper-Curation

It was a Friday. A sickle shaped moon dissipated beyond the horizon. As the sun rose, bleeding orange hues into dawn, the internet was birthed. It first appeared in the public domain on the 30^th of April 1993. In its infancy of dial-up lines and teething connections, it brought with it the democratization of information.

The platform and global network has since exploded. The contemporary state of the ‘Post-Internet’ condition refers to a saturation of this digitized space. What was novel in the nineties is now teetering on banality.

Daniel Rautenbach – a recent graduate from the University of Cape Town’s honours curatorial programme describes the space as “intangible” with a set of “complex interweaving connections”. His project and thesis centers around the intersection of digital space and curatorship.

“Conflux of Parallels explores the ways in which the Virtual and the Real concurrently reflect each other”. In a digital age, the border between online/offline space is becoming increasingly blurred. The conceptual framework for the project stemmed from the writing of Hito Steyerl – articulating intersections of social politics through digitization – and Actor Network Theory drawing on sociological concepts of interconnectivity.

“While the exhibition makes use of virtual reality, Conflux of Parallels is not inherently about virtual reality technology, it is rather about our virtual reality: how our lives are influenced by the digital world and furthermore how this digital realm is used by others in manifesting power.” The role of the curator in this instance is to create and tailor the visual experience of the viewer – constructing a visual argument.

This is also achieved through manipulating modes and conventions of display. “Particular viewing environments can dramatically alter the interpretation of the artworks.” In this way, the curator may act as a kind of co-author, working in collaboration with the artist. Daniel describes how, “as a curator, I find it is crucial for work that critiques online spaces to be accessible to the people who access these online spaces”

Often the white cube is depicted as a ‘neutral’ and accessible space, this fallacy is explored in Conflux of Parallels. It serves as a platform to introduce digital work into the space – however, articulated as a fully immersive experience. It further subverts the system by disseminating the artworks to, “non-gallery goers”. In this sense mirroring the nature of the democratized internet.

Most of the artworks selected in Daniel’s show are available online – offering an alternative viewing space and experience. Both of which exist in the public domain. “Virtual reality is thus used in the exhibition as a collaborative curating tool. This is particularly exemplified by the two digital installations curated within their respective virtual environments: Ghost Raid (2011) a music video produced by Alex Gjovic for Fatima al Qadiri, and the collection of collage images by Szonja Szendi.”

Digital environments were constructed by means of Unity 3D modelling software. The Cape Town based studio, Renderheads, facilitated the process. Viewers donned a Virtual Reality headset to view the installations. “The use of virtual reality thus functions as a form of hyper-curation where instead of curating elements of the existing, localised gallery, the viewing experience is transported to a completely new environment. Using 3D modelling software, the creation of a virtual environment is almost limitless in comparison to the specific space of a white cube gallery.”

Conflux of Parallels simultaneously uses and critiques the internet as platform. In the accompanying catalogue, Daniel states that: “Since algorithms learn from the web users’ activity and only 18% of the African continent has Internet penetration in comparison to USA’s 88,5% or the UK’s 92,6% it can be seen how online content is driven with a Western perspective”. Despite the façade of free-flowing knowledge production throughout global networks, an underlying Eurocentric agenda is at play – controlling symbolic value and cultural currency.

“If our physiological data and vernacular existence become further commodities of state and military power, we can only hope we are granted a sense of control and freedom to still mobilise our physical bodies. Our capitalist desires will soon need to be matched with a true understanding of customer rights, privacy policies and knowledge of how our engagements in the virtual contributes to power in the real. Since soon enough we will speak out only to realise we ourselves are content being moderated.” Self-reflectivity and critical analysis of the consumption of media is crucial in undermining Western propagandist motives.

View Conflux of Parallels catalogue here.

13 December 2016