Your chance to dial in to a digital Africa through art

POST African Futures, an exhibition of new digital art and performance by artists from various African countries, opens at Joburg’s Goodman Gallery on Thursday.

Tegan Bristow was invited to curate the exhibition around her cohesive research into technology-based art in Africa.

“I believe that the global view of technology in Africa is still a view with a very distinct bias – and that is a Western bias,” she says while explaining her point of departure.

She is an interactive media artist and head of the Interactive Media stream of the Digital Arts Division of the Wits School Of Art.

This is an exhibition that could introduce you to digital art specifically in Africa with emphasis on South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria.

And even here, notes Bistrow, the differences are marked: “What we don’t think about enough is how African… culture is affected and affecting technology.”

That’s what this exhibition aims to do. She urged invited artists to ask questions about globalised media and how Africa is represented in it.

“When I started my research,” she notes, “I was looking for any documentation on Africa, culture and technology.”

What she found was that technology is only looked at from a development and “innovation” perspective. And is usually driven by Google or IBM, but that no real consideration is paid to local systems of knowledge or that a particular culture of technology exists. To illustrate the point she focused on Kenya and South Africa: “Here technology is historically tied to apartheid and its aggressive systems of control.”

There is a growing youth culture plugged into digital technologies, but the industry doesn’t necessarily support any significant startup development.