Digital Imaginaries: Premonition @ WAM & Fak’ugesi
Story Posted: 25 July 2018
Categories: Press,Festival,Artists
In 2018 we are collaborating on a co-produced exhibition and series of workshops with the Wits Art Museum. The ‘Premonition’ is the specific to this exhibition which is the second leg of a larger three city project title ‘Digital Imaginaries” – that took place in Dakar, Senegal in May this year and will conclude in Karlsruhe, Germany in November 2018 at the ZKM – Centre for Media Arts.
As the month progresses we will be offering various activies and workshops that relate to the exhibition and questions, via Fak’ugesi Festival.
The project explores the collaboration between social scientists, artists and digital makers – their imaginings and critiques of how globalised digital technology and its systems have and continue to shape and shift African futures. The vaguely sinister exploratory notion ‘Premonition’, references an exhibition that explores questions surrounding data, knowledge and decolonisation within a globalised information society. If the data we input and the information we receive online is leading us into a systems that helps us make decisions, what role does the very human form of instinct and premonition hold and how does this interfere, disrupt and compare to the digital?
At the exhibition, artists and students have engaged with WAM’s collections in a number of ways; Divination objects from the Wits Art Museum collections of African art have been used by an artist in developing video projection (Neustetter); an exploration of algorithmic thinking via beadwork (Hlongwane, Roxo, Coehlo & Bristow) that invites the public to make their own; and in a brand new exploration by Wits Digital Arts students in an unpacking of the presence of fractal mathematics in pre-colonial African cultures – presented via a AR application that allows you to “take” these object home.
Thus activating the collection as a resource for contemporary concerns within an investigation of alternative knowledge systems.
