Digital Echoes
Story Posted: 11 October 2022
Categories: Showcases
A collaboration between the University of the Witwatersrand’s Film and TV and Digital Arts departments brings you five VR films and Augmented Reality experiences that aim to capture the 1970s to the 2010s. Our films aim to digitally capture fragments of Wits’ history – using technology to reflect on the past and its impact on the future. Fak’ugesi Explorer ‘Maya’ travels back in time, living an echo, of the past in order to find her way back to the present.
Maya – 70s Group “free the people”
In a country divided by discrimination and violence, Wits University was a place for like-minded individuals to come together, no matter their race. Seeing a group of students able to put aside their differences to grieve the loss of an activist and the cruelness of apartheid, through the power of music and poetry proves the spirit of Ubuntu is always alive in the hearts of South Africans, even in the darkest of times.
Maya – 80s group “fading legacy, raging love”
When the world was full of colour, and shoulder pads were all the rage, South Africans had another kind of rage. While the Apartheid government clung desperately to the fading legacy they built, a pair of lovers on the Wits campus wrestle with their reality and their dreams. Will their relationship survive the pressures of the crumbling world around them?
Maya – 90s Group – “fray the good away”
Well, well, well, if it isn’t the 90s. The most colourful and loudest time of personal innovation and development, from the music to the art, this period had ‘freedom!’ written all over it. People all over the world knew the 90s as a liberation period all thanks to Wits’ very own President Mandela, a graduate of Law, and a symbol to all! But with liberation comes comparison, desperation, and contemplation. And even though so much good can go a long way, the insecurities of one person can fray the good away, if you let it.
Maya – 00s Group – “a new South Africa”
A new millennium for a new South Africa. Our story takes a closer look at the budding love between two students over the course of their university years in the early 2000s. It is centered around the newly opened Matrix, an integral Wits space where friendships are formed and love blooms. Told through a letter from a father to his son, we follow along as this couple navigates their way through the trials and tribulations of university life, seeing how their Wits experience shapes this relationship.
Maya – 10s Group – “fees must fall”
Let’s backtrack to a political uproar that had the whole country in arms, fees must fall. Witness the aftermath caused by the student fees protests as they try to go back to their “new normal” while the world around them is still exploding.
