Future Lab Africa

In this episode Tegan Bristow interviews Fak’ugesi Resident Ling Tan. About Resident Artist Ling Tan: Ling Tan is a designer, maker and coder interested in how people interact with the built environment and wearable technology. Trained as an architect, she enjoys building physical machines and prototypes to explore different modes of interaction between people and their surrounding spaces. She currently works at Umbrellium in London to understand social wearables through community participation. Her works have been featured in magazines and websites across the globe and has been nominated for the Internet of Things Awards. www.lingql.com About Curator Tegan Bristow: Tegan Bristow is a Johannesburg-based interactive media artist and lecturer and head of Interactive Digital Media at the Digital Arts Division of the University of the Witwatersrand. She is currently completing her PhD on Technology, Art and Culture Practices in Africa. As an artist, Bristow has exhibited widely, exhibitions include “Meaning Motion” at the Wits Art Museum and the Hotel Yeoville Project. Recently Bristow curated an extensive exhibition of African technology art with the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, titled ‘Post African Futures.’ Short Description A festival residency which hosted three disciplines hardware (maker), software and arts with the Fak’ugesi Digital Africa Festival in Johannesburg South Africa. Residents comprised of two artists from the UK, Ling Tand and Kasia Molga, and two artists from South Africa, Nathan Gates and Jepchumba. Following the Fak’ugesi Festival, residents present outcomes in a residency exchange at Watermans in London in November 2015. Residency Theme The residency is developed in extension of the Fak’ugesi Digital Africa Festival, and the festival itself is about not only the convergence of technology, art and culture, but also the development of Braamfontien in Johannesburg as a new hub for digital media and technology cultures evolving from a vibrant community of young creatives living and working in the area. The residency is an invitation to respond to the environment by exploring it as it stands and to create speculative and digital public engagement in response to this theme: “Futurist Visions of Johannesburg / City: uncovering place and space, physical and virtual responses to ‘now’ for socio-cultural technologies of the future.” Working together, sharing insights and knowledge while engaging the city and its technology cultures, we invited the residents to bring into being a speculative technological-engagement that asks questions of a futuristic Johannesburg / City. 2015 Partners SA/UK Seasons, project funding in establishing relationships between the UK and South Africa. Watermans, West London community arts and performance centre with curator Irini Papadimitriou. Watermans will host the residency exchange for London as part of a digital media weekender festival in November 2014. Wits Art Museum, an Art Museum in Johannesburg South Africa that will not only host the residency studio but will show the outcomes in exhibition following the residency in Johannesburg. Fak’ugesi Digital Africa Festival, the organising event in which the initial residency is contained, with Tegan Bristow as lead on the project.  

In this episode we speak to long time friends and musicians, Just A Band from Kenya. About the Artist Just A Band. The group was formed when their members were studying at Kenyatta University. They went on to release the song “IWINYO PINY” accompained by a self-made animated music video. Initially the song received little airplay to to its unconventional musical style, but with time they started to gain popularity through underground channels. Their debut album SCRATCH TO REVEAL was relatively successfull. They released their second single HA-HE‘ on 17 March 2010, accompanied by a music video featuring a charater known as Makmende. The video has subsequently been described as Kenya’s first viral internet meme by the Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fast Company. Also their track “HUFF + PUFF” can be hear over the 2012 movie “House at the End of the Street”. Just A Band is a Kenyan House/ Funk / Disco band whose career was launched with their debut album, “Scratch To Reveal” in 2008. Their Music has explored various musical directions such as, but not limited to, Jazz, Hip Hop, Disco and Electronica. The Band are also notable for their DIY aesthetic. In addition to writing, recording and engineering their music, the band creates their own music video’s, packaging and promotional items and establishing a strong we and blog presence.  

About the Episode. In this episode we speak to renowned art duo Pamela Phatisom Sunstrum and Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi on their ongoing The Legend of DISRUPTER X project. About The Artists Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum is an artist and creative researcher working in the fields of drawing, animation, installation and performance. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Artists in New York, The Kitchen in New York, Room Urban Art Space in Johannesburg, the Ithuba Arts Gallery in Johannesburg, the FRAC Gallery in Carquefou, France, and the 2012 Havana Biennale in Cuba. Her research interests include exploring the political possibilities of imagining and occupying what she calls “Mythologies of the Future.” Sunstrum was born in Mochudi, Botswana and grew up living in different parts of Africa, Asia and North America. After completing her Masters in Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, USA, Sunstrum returned to Johannesburg where she currently lives and works. Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi was born in New York and has lived in Harare and Johannesburg on and off since the early 1990s. She is a painter, video artist and filmmaker who divides her time between studio work and navigating the field of art as social practice. Her work investigates power and its structures – political, social, architectural. Implicit in her examination of these structures is an interrogation of the invisible forces that create them, and an imagining of alternatives. Her paintings and films have been shown at the Ifa Gallery in Berlin, the South London Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rio de Janeiro and the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg. Reflections on the collaborative project Border Farm will be included in the publications Wide Angle: Photography as Public Practice (Fourthwall) and What We Want is Free: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art (SUNY Press). Nkosi obtained her BA from Harvard University and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. The Legend, briefly: X is a soldier in the Disrupter Army. The Disrupters are dissidents. They are the only force in The World still fighting against The Agency. The Agency turns living things into programmable, interchangeable pieces of data for their army. The Agency will stop at nothing to incorporate everyone and everything into their data-army.

Interview with South African filmmaker Lebogang Rasethaba on his latest film Future Sounds of Mzansi. He discusses his discovery of storytelling through Film through his projects and studies in China.

In this episode we speak to new media artist Tabita Rezaire. We speak about cyberspaces, alter egos and the power of representation. She describes her work with screen based resistance.   About Tabita Rezaire Tabita Rezaire is a French-Guyanese and Danish new media artist based in Johannesburg. She holds a Master in Artist Moving Image from Central Saint Martins College in London. Both her research and practice focus on the political aesthetics of resistance through screen-based practices. She engages in cinematic urban intervention and digital activism, producing videos and web-platforms, curating screenings, giving talks and leading booty knowledge workshops. Exploring the performativity of encounters, online and offline, she addresses the coloniality of power of sexual identity, race politics and gender conformity, confronting the inherited hierarchy of knowledge systems, media stigmatisation and occidental hegemony. She rethinks strategies of perception through image production and alienation, exploring power relationships at stake in contemporary supremacist-hetero-normative economy. Understanding the screen as a site for social and political engagement, the screens she engages with become platforms for radical and militant images. She is currently busy decolonizing cyber space.

    About this Episode In our first episode we speak to the curator of the Post African Futures Exhibition, Tegan Bristow. We talk about cultures of knowledge, digital art, Afrofuturism and the motivation behind curating Post African Futures. About Tegan Bristow Bristow is an interactive digital media artists and Head of Interactive Media at the Digital Arts Division of the Wits School of Arts at Wits University. Bristow is writing her PhD on Technology Art and Cultural Practices in Africa. This exhibition follows research through which Bristow is proposing a new ways of teaching technology arts specific to Africa, as well as challenging norms around technology’s role in art and culture in Africa.