kagablog

Gallery AOP
Kinnickinnic, lithograph + LCD video, 255 x 355 x 50 mm

Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
30 January 2010 - 27 February 2010

Opening Saturday 30 January from 12:00 to 16:00
Opening address by Prof. Christo Doherty, Wits Digital Arts, at 12:30
The artists will be in attendance at the opening

Walkabout on Saturday 6 February at 12:00
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue and DVD

About the Work

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern approach both old and new media as form. In their “Distill Life” works, the artists permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating moving images on paper. They incorporate technologies and aesthetics from traditional printmaking - including woodblock, silk screen, etching, lithography, photogravure etc - with the technologies and aesthetics of contemporary digital, video and networked art, to explore images as multidimensional.

Meuninck-Ganger and Stern hack and tweak, shoot and print, appropriate and remix, edit and draw. Their juxtaposition of anachronistic and disparate methods, materials and content -print and video, paper and electronics, real and virtual - enables novel approaches to understanding each. The artists engage with subject matter ranging from historical portraiture to current events, from hyperreal landscapes to socially awkward moments. The works are surprising, wistful, enchanting, and seriously playful.

http://nathanielstern.com
http://jessicameuninck.com
http://galleryaop.com

Gallery AOP, 44 Stanley Avenue, Braamfontein Werf, Johannesburg South Africa
Tuesday - Friday 10:00 - 17:00 Saturday 10:00 - 15:00

click here to see the photos

3 colours - the controversial mixed media performance event which he staged for the 4th world summit on arts and culture held in johannesburg recently. concept and direction by brett bailey. musical direction by mapumba cilombo, lead choreography by gregory maqoma; costume design by black coffee

a striking new physical theatre piece called woman of the snow, directed by jenni-lee crewe at the wits theatre. the dance play, based upon masaki kobayashi’s 1965 classic film the woman of the snow, tells an old japanese ghost story of forbidden love.

dizu plaatjies, multi-intrumentalist and renowned expert on southern african indigenous music. performing with turn to the traveler at the 2009 national arts festival, grahamstown.

Trolley Works is a multi-disciplinary art project led by Ismail Farouk dedicated to the acknowledgment of the informal economic activities and cultural diversity present in Johannesburg inner-city. The project exhibition opened at the new Goethe on Main gallery on Friday 25 May. Photos of the exhibition by Christo Doherty. http://www.trolleyworks.net/

by Dr Andreas Broeckmann

Wits Digital Arts
Wed 3 June
13:15 – 14:00
Convent Seminar Room

Since the 1980s, festivals have been the most important hubs for
the promotion and distribution of media art. The evolution of these
festivals therefore also reflects the way in which conceptions of
media art have changed. First founded in 1988, the Transmediale
festival in Berlin, for instance, was initially a venue only for
video art, and only in the course of the 90s opened its programme for
interactive and multi-media art. Its traditional critical approach,
first articulated by many political documentaries in the programme,
later resulted in major conferences on the social impact of digital
media. Andreas Broeckmann, who was the director of transmediale from
2001 - 2007, will discuss the transformation of media art over the
past 20 years and will offer an outlook onto the preparations for the
ISEA2010 RUHR, the 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art,
which he is organising in the German Ruhr region for next year.

For more information please contact:
Prof Christo Doherty
Head of Digital Arts
Wits School of Arts
University of the Witwatersrand
christo.doherty@wits.ac.za
+27 11 717 4682
+27 84 331 9590
www.wits.ac.za/artworks

In a deliberately provocative presentation on 13 May, Professor Christo Doherty of Wits University’s Digital Arts department opened the Digital Media For Broadcasters Conference at the Wanderer’s Club in Johannesburg by stating that where the Internet is concerned, content is NOT king.

For decades broadcasters and content producers have adhered to the adage that content is king. Doherty made the point that in the digital age of new media, connectivity is king.

“We’re all learning how to live in the connected world. The idea of this conference is to pose questions about the nature of the Internet as a communications tool. I think we need to raise controversy on this subject because no-one really knows what’s going on,” said Doherty.

In closing Doherty maintained that broadcasters should realise that the networked world is both anti-hierarchical and against commercialism.

See full story and report on the Digital Media for Broadcasters Conference in the June issue of Screen Africa.

Christo Doherty’s new show, seen first at the Wits Substation Gallery and then during March at Resolution Gallery, is entitled ‘Small Worlds’. Through a series of photographic prints, Doherty explores the phenomenon of railway modelers in South Africa, as precursors to digital or computer-age ‘imagined worlds’.

I spoke to Doherty about the body of work, and about refuge in imagined environments.

Michael Smith: Given your association with all things technological (Doherty is Professor and Head of Digital Arts at the Wits School of Arts), railway modeling seems like an unexpected means with which to explore imagined worlds.

Christo Doherty: Yes, it is a rather oblique angle! But I see the analogue worlds created by these modelers as precursors to the virtual worlds that have proliferated on the World Wide Web. In a strange way they share recognizable elements of the same psycho-geography.

MS: Were you conscious of avoiding the almost default fascination with cutting-edge technology that often accompanies work in this area of thought? Railway modeling is decidedly lo-fi in technology. Furthermore, your images are technologically simple, un-manipulated still photographs.

CD: By approaching the topic from this angle I could avoid those concerns with innovative technology and concentrate on the imaginative aspects of the constructed worlds. For this reason, as well, my photographs are intended to capture the modelers’ views of their created worlds. I was fascinated by how the modelers imaginatively inhabit their created spaces, and I sought to reveal this in the photographic images.

MS: Your catalog essay, ‘Rail technology, nostalgia and South African landscape’ makes the point that many of the landscapes created by railway modelers operate from an impulse of nostalgia. This seems strongly at odds with the impulse towards creating futuristic, often forbidding landscapes in the digital texts you mention in your essay, like video games in particular.

CD: Yes, railway modelers are necessarily driven by a nostalgic impulse; but this is common to many digital environments as well. Hugely popular game worlds such as Warcraft, or the many World War 2 games also trade on nostalgia for an imagined past. Even the futuristic worlds are tinged with a nostalgia ñ a ‘nostalgia for the future’.

MS: Yet, the common thread is the creation of worlds to take refuge in.

CD: Yes, this is definitely the common thread which, when unraveled, leads from the analogue worlds of the railway modeler to the most futuristic imaginings of the virtual netizens. Yes, of course, in the South African context, the impulse to take refuge from the changing world has a strongly political implication.

MS: The image Township squatter camp and railway lines reveals a certain aggression towards anomalous elements within nostalgic landscapes: the informal settlement beside the railway tracks is noteworthy because it features a group of Black residents ‘necklacing’ a victim. This is one of very few representations of Blackness within a set of mostly idealized landscapes, as if the only way Otherness could be included was under the premise of a reductive racism and White moralizing. Would this be fair to say?

CD: Yes, this is a valid observation and certainly one supported by my visual research into these landscapes. The worlds of these railway modelers are often a refuge from the political dilemmas of transformation in South Africa. The modelers are overwhelmingly white males who find respite from the anxieties of the new South Africa in their imagined environments.

One modeler, when I confronted him about the lack of Black people in his landscapes (which were otherwise painstakingly realistic in every detail) snapped at me: ‘This is my South Africa, and I don’t have to have Black people in my South Africa if I don’t want them!’

MS: Many of the installations feature painted elements behind the models. Class GMAM Garratt and passenger coach, and Karoo and Class 5E Electric Locomotive in particular have painted mountains that recall JH Pierneef’s works. In fact, the entire project of the railway modelers seems like an extension of Pierneef’s idylls. Were you aware of your works, in turn, setting up dialogues with key Pierneef paintings?

CD: A very interesting observation! I can’t say that I found any kind of conscious dialogue between the modelers and key Pierneef paintings; but the resemblances, I think, arise from the fact that Pierneef’s imagery has been absorbed at an unconscious level into naÔve South African landscape art.

Interestingly, the background paintings are often the work of the wives or females relatives of the modelers. The male modelers concentrate on the foreground details and the rolling stock while the female input is on the backgrounds.

MS: The work Suburban train coaches with graffiti seems to be the sole example in this project of railway modeling as direct reportage, representing the experience most people have of contemporary rail travel. Was the modeler, Pramod Makan, aware of his installation in this manner?

CD: Yes, Pramod Makan has a rather different orientation towards his installation. He was particularly proud of the graffiti work on his carriages. On the evening that he finished these carriages he told me that he was so excited that he ran the train around his layout until dawn the next day. Perhaps his orientation is different because he is the only ‘non-white’ railway modeler that I have encountered in South Africa.

MS: In a broader sense, I am interested in imagined worlds as they intersect with or, in many cases, intrude upon the sovereignty of the ‘real world’. I recently read about the phenomenon of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPPG’s) like World of Warcraft (WoW) collecting obsessive devotees at every turn: kids failing their varsity courses because they spend all their time playing WoW, relationships breaking up due to gaming addiction, scholars not turning up for school because they’re too exhausted from 14-hour stretches of gaming, etc. One friend told me a story of medical sundries companies reporting sales spikes in catheters since the launch of WoW, and the accompanying speculation that these are being used by gamers to self-catheterize to prevent time being lost to urination. Would it be true to say that an interest in this level of obsession seems to inform your project?

CD: Absolutely! I think these railway modelers share something of the gamer’s obsessive need for imaginative involvement in their worlds; yet they are also ‘outsider artists’ who create because it fills a psychic longing and have to externalize their imaginings in a physical object.

MS: You state in your essay that ‘industrial landscapes have been under-represented in South African landscape art’. Some of your images like Class 34 Diesel units and petrol tankers, and Crane above turntable certainly do trade the picturesque vista for gritty realism. Furthermore, your pictorial decisions, i.e. zooming in so that the machinery occupies the entire pictorial space, deny the neutralizing effects of miniaturization. Were these intended as comments on the tendency of miniaturized landscapes to neutralize harsh realities?

CD: I wasn’t aware of that in my compositions. Most of my framing decisions were intended to support the intended realism of the model builders. I feel this goal was achieved when visitors to the exhibition experienced an uncertainty as to whether they were looking at images of real or miniature worlds.

this interview first published on artthrob.co.za

we say “it’s a small world”

hence it’s a “small worlds”

the title is a play of worlds

a world play

but what is a world?

we speak of the earth as the world.

a system complete in itself

an autonomous system

of course this autonomy is an illusion

the world is, and part of, the solar system.

which in turn is in, and part of, the milky way, a galaxy, and so on

worlds within worlds

a world’s autonomy does not preclude its existence as part of, as a component of, and in, other worlds

this is metaphysics

the alchemical formula for this understanding of how worlds work is : as above so below

another way of putting this: the universe in a grain of sand

our understanding of the world, of our world, of any world, is predicated on a worldview; which is a framework, or a model of the world

the function of a model of the world is to explain the world.

how does the world work?

how did it come into being?

what is its relationship to other worlds?

in order to understand our world; the world, any worlds - we need to construct reliable models.

our studying of these models is the basis of knowledge.

it is what in philosophy is called epistemology.

finally, to re-iterate: worlds are always the building blocks adding up to bigger worlds.

and all worlds, in their turn, are made up of building blocks that we might call small worlds.

improvised section about christo as carl linnaeus

taxonomy

the artist as dj

the framing defines the series as art

these are photographs of worlds

but now the photo series itself, the taxonomized image sequence, becomes a world

and this is how all worlds work

and this infinite inter-connectivity of all worlds is why there is only one world

and this, once again, is metaphysics

nothing is not connected

it’s a small world

aryan kaganof

You are invited to a presentation by the DURBAN SINGS internet audio
project.

Date: Tuesday 24 March: 13:15 ­ 14:00
Venue: Digital Convent Seminar Room
East Campus, Wits University.

DURBAN SINGS is a regional audio media and oral history project with a story to tell. The project uses street recordings and internet audio to create an open platform for contributions and re-mixes from artists and activists around the world. DURBAN SINGS is a sound network joining hemispheres via audio correspondence between listeners. DURBAN SINGS is an audio bridge between communities, artists and activist groups in KzN and the rest of the world.

Presenters:
Claudia Wegener (radio continental drift), a German, London-based sound and media artist organising collective radio projects (such as the NGZ audio radio project: http://www.nogozones.wordpress.com), visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). http://www.radiocontinentaldrift.wordpress.com

Molefi Mafereka Ndlovu (motho) born in Johannesburg now based in Durban; is a research fellow at Center for Civil Society full profile @:
http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?10,24. He is a founding member of the RASAfm Radio Project (Pimville, Soweto 2005), he is a third year student of Community Development at UKZN- Howard College.

For further information ­ christo.doherty@wits.ac.za

one of the great afrikaans actors of his generation, marcel van heerden, explains the background to starting the legendary noise-protest group, koos, during the darkest days of apartheid in south africa. in the late 1980s he travelled through namibia as part of an afrikaans theater troupe. he had been exempted from military service; so he had no idea of the severity of the war, until his group arrived at the northern military town of oshikati near the angolan border. to his amazement there were trenches and bunkers on an enormous scale around the entire town. he hadn’t realised this was happening. the white population in South Africa was screened from the reality of the war by the state controlled media. that night they performed their play in the town and shortly afterwards the sky lit up with arcs of tracer fire and the ground shook with the percussion of motar bombs. marcel ended up having to take shelter in one of the bunkers, shaking through a long night of automatic fire and explosions.

when he got back to south africa he decided he had to do something - what else could he do? he started a band - koos.
after three years of playing they released a single cassette, sold in a brown paper bag - the black tape.

marcel van heerden was photographed at the launch of this previously unatainable recording made by the group in 1989 with shifty records. the new release of the black tape was produced by warren siebrits with paul riekert’s one f label.

trolleyworks is a multi-disciplinary activist art project which seeks to mobilize trolley-pushers as a catalyst for street-level business activity in downtown johannesburg. designed and led by artist-geographer, ismail farouk, the project aims to develop a comprehensive profile of the informal trolley pushers and other economic activities that have sprung up around the taxi ranks in the greater joubert park since 1994. the participants, all trolley pushers active in the area, will use trolley-mounted videocams in custombuilt super trolleys to map the informal economic activities of the bustling and crowded streets. because most of the trolley pushers are economic immigrants from zimbabwe and mozambique, their activities will be a lens to explore the social diversity of the inner-city. in this way the project aims to demonstrate the potential role of immigrant controlled business as contributing towards the economic and cultural regeneration of the this african mega-city. for more information go to www.trolleyworks.net.

Small Worlds is a visual investigation into the imagined worlds of South African railway modelers using photography and video. These large-format photographs are intended to play with the viewer’s sense of scale, thereby providing vivid glimpses into the psycho-geography of these virtual worlds as imagined by their creators. At the same time these images are also an exploration of the way in which South African landscape, criss-crossed and overlaid by technology, is represented in a particular niche of South African popular culture. South African landscape art has tended to ignore the industrial landscape in favour of idealised vistas of veld and berg. These tiny prospects shine a narrow light on the industrial landscape and their creator’s complex relationship to our South African past - bathed in nostalgia for a disappearing technology and, more problematically, for the social order of Apartheid that was underwritten by the railways system.

christo doherty

the show is already up on the Resolution gallery website. check out the “on show” section.

www.resolutiongallery.com

Project
by Chad Rossouw

In 1983 William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, the book credited with inventing virtual reality and the term ‘cyberspace’, concepts which have largely, though in a vastly different way, come to be relevant in contemporary life. Curiously, in at least two of his later novels which have similar themes, he uses art objects as the Macguffin (in the Hitchcock sense) to drive his plots, partly because they are an unsolveable mystery around which the characters wrap themselves, and partly because art objects make an appropriate metaphor for virtual reality. Art can be immersive, complex, unfathomable, programmed and social, and as such, tie in perfectly with the aims of the novel.

In a recent show at the Substation Gallery at Wits, called ‘Small Worlds’ Christo Doherty investigated this metaphor, although from a different direction. He looks to the past, as opposed to a speculative future, to try and shed light on the idea of virtual worlds. In this instance he photographs the obsessive worlds created by model train enthusiasts living in South Africa and representing its landscapes. Somewhat appropriately, my investigation of his show took place wholly online, through entries on a blog, where he writes an interesting and poetic account of the work and via his Flickr set. These two sites are examples of contemporary virtual reality where one builds up an online ‘presence’ and conducts social interactions.

The work however refuses to be stuck as metaphor, and the investigation of the virtual becomes only one aspect of it, the rest being filled with a strange mix of the landscapes themselves and the personality traces of the characters who built them. Like all virtual worlds it is the content of them that strikes one, not the shell. In these intimate photographs of the small and intricate sets, a nostalgia is apparent. Due to our country’s inescapable history a longing for the past inevitably takes on a political meaning, out of place in the hobbyists’ enthusiasm but nevertheless prevalent.

Normally, representations of the landscape in this country either take on idealised forms free of human presence or the stark brutality of a Goldblatt print. In the train sets, the representation is an idealised industrial one sitting between the two representations. It has the starkness of industrial South Africa and its implications of apartheid labour while at the same time a wistful sincere longing for the golden age of the railroad.

It returns then to the use of virtual worlds, which we would like to think of as a force for a unifying technotopia, but are in fact the partisan projections of niche social groups.

this article first appeared on artthrob.co.za

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Once not so long ago, before I had bothered to get a driver’s licence, I took a train from Johannesburg to Grahamstown for the National Arts Festival. Four hours into the journey, after my cabin-fellows and I had finally shooed the dysfunctional child from next door who had been licking our window since we pulled out of the station, I plugged my ‘phone charger into the shaving plug point provided in the cabin and the train suddenly stopped. It stayed stopped for at least an hour, and I pretended to sleep, the evidence of my electronic misdemeanor buried deep in my bag.* The train resurrected, eventually, but was headed in the opposite direction, back towards Johannesburg. Then it stopped again. Time for two hours’ worth of coffee-coloured bath water and horse burgers from the onboard BJ’s. Then it started again. And stopped again. Backwards and stopping time accounted for, the journey took 28 hours — that’s ten more than I paid for.

My most recent blogging activity has been something like this train ride — erratic and slow, verging on backwards. The point of the anecdote, or at least the point that tried to suggest itself in the moment of guilt that preceded my writing this, was to fashion a link between some sort of indirect apology for my scarcity in the blogosphere and what I really want to talk about — Small Worlds, Christo Doherty’s solo exhibition at the Substation gallery, Wits School of Arts. This exhibition has a lot to do with trains, whereas my reasons for not having written for ages don’t (unless you count keeping a car on the road as one of them), so let’s just stick with Christo.

Small Worlds is an exhibition of photographs and a video installation that track constructions of a fantasy South Africa through representations of the landscape by railway modellers. The thesis of the exhibition is two-fold, and very neatly reasoned. First, Doherty, who is Head of Digital Art at the Wits School of Arts, reminds us that, although the internet has made virtual worlds like Second Life ubiquitous, it did not invent them. He observes that these virtual worlds in many cases take their cues from pre-existing analogue versions of alternative “small worlds”. Following new media theorist Lev Manovich, Doherty asks in his exhibition catalogue, “Shouldn’t we try to understand the psycho-geography of the new virtual worlds through exploring earlier analogue precedents?”

The second aspect of the thesis looks closely at the types of landscapes created by a number of railway modellers Doherty found under rocks and other such hidden places around the country. Each photograph on the exhibition depicts a model train poised in a particular hand-built “layout”, with each modeller credited for his efforts in the work’s title. What is common to many of the layouts is that they represent the bygone South Africa of their creators’ childhoods, or rather, the pastoral paradise of veld and mines as manipulated through years of memory. Incidentally, the miniature inhabitants of these scenes are overwhelmingly white and male, which is echoed in the demographic spectrum of the modellers. Black characters are rare — they don’t even crack it as manual labourers — and where they do appear, they are clearly aberrant, disruptive presences.

Although no digital small worlds are represented in the show, the relationship between digital and analogue small worlds is implied in the screen-like scale and media of the works. For instance, the photographs are roughly the size of a computer or television screen. They also interpret three-dimensional small worlds as flat images. This means that their three-dimensionality is only implicit, as it would be were they digital virtual worlds engaged with via a screen. The video installation — my favourite part of the exhibition — is of a much larger scale and is projected onto a wall. In this work, Doherty attached a tiny video camera to a model train and then whizzed it around a model track. The visuals are blurry and ambiguous and, if the stations and landscape were not so eerily still and empty of human presence, the changing scenery could easily be captured from real life. At one point in the video sequence we catch a glimpse of Doherty controlling the train from the edge of the model environment. This is dizzying as it jolts us into a sense of the proper scale of this environment, but it also alerts us to the disjuncture between the virtual world of the model train, which until this point had aped reality quite well, and the real world from which the model world is controlled.

It’s all very The Matrix meets Thomas the Tank Engine. For that alone, you should see it. But you only have until Thursday, so best you hurry off to Wits School of Arts, endure the disgruntled parking wardens and see Small Worlds.

The details:

Small Worlds runs at the Substation gallery, opposite the Wits Theatre, until Thursday November 27. To get there, drive (or walk) down Jorissen Street and turn left into Station Street to enter the Wits School of Arts (WSOA) complex. Alternatively, you may want to park on Jorissen and walk in, as parking legally inside the WSOA complex is nearly impossible in the daylight.

*A note to my engineer readers: I am now aware of the extreme unlikelihood of my misplugged phone charger having rerouted a train.

this article originally appeared on thoughtleader.co.za

1. small worlds. “in my thoughts i could not sufficiently wonder at the intrepidity of these diminutive mortals, who durst venture to mount and walk on my body, while one of my hands was at liberty, without trembling at the very sight of so prodigious a creature as i must appear to them” - gulliver’s travels, a voyage to lilliput. jonathon swift.

the internet has made imagined worlds ubiquitous, but it did not invent them. many aspects of virtual digital worlds have roots in older analogue versions, such as the model railway worlds. this project looks at these small worlds in order to understand the psycho-geography of virtual worlds. this project also examines how these worlds are imaginary representations, often bathed in poisonous nostalgia, of South African rail landscapes, and explores the idea that industrial landscapes have been under-represented in south african landscape art.