ISEA2018 Art Event Overview

Other Realities sub-programme

Johannesburg-based visual artists were invited by animateur of the Centre for the Less Good Idea, Bronwyn Lace and founder William Kentridge to develop sculptural drawings using Tiltbrush, a room-scale 3D painting virtual reality application developed and published by Google and loaned to the Centre by Dondoo Studios and Clearwater South Africa. Creative technologists Rick Treweek and Gareth Steele from AltReality and Divesh Naidoo and James Gaydon of Dondoo Studios worked closely with some of South Africa’s most celebrated visual artists to create the augmented and virtual reality sculptural drawings featured in the Invisible Exhibition.

This is neither the reaction to nor the antidote for Electronic Art – it is reverence shown to its ancestors. In the beginning… was simpler stuff, like clay or wood or grass fashioned into vessels or rattan; all sturdy things that initially served a practical purpose, like clay to contain beer, or rope to tether an animal . But then some visionary said “This piece of pottery reminds me of a vessel to contain the universe”, and so, through the metaphor, craft elbowed its way into art. Of course once the genie was out the bottle it was open season: another bright spark said “If I can dream about assembling events in my mind, instead of representing them just as words on a page or marks on a canvas I can scramble them up in a cipher, a number soup that can be sent across the solar system to a satellite or just down the road if I want.”

ISEA is about electronic art and the enormous power it wields. But this part of the exhibition is about an exploration of the roots of an artform that will eventually outgrow the title Electronic Art to become the datum. Returning to the prototypes, the thing on which ideas were hung: the subjects in this part of the exhibition are plainly of this world – Voortrekker wagons; pictures of men digging gold from the pit; early marine engineering and moving on to aircraft taking flight. These physical representations are the progenitors and the feedstock from which virtual artworks are made and must be understood in a different and a more fundamental frame – respect the atoms!

Makers, recyclers, hackers, inventors, survivalists manipulate not only materials and media, but systems. Responding to the status-quo of a time and place, these actors rethink and recycle discarded and unwanted items, structures and ideas to take ownership, create new perspectives or survive the every day. This is a platform for local and impactful alternatives that are re-structuring approaches and knowledge systems for the benefit of many.

Socially engaged practices and research, art – science collaboration and technological experimentation transform the gallery space from a workshop environment to showcasing projects that contribute on the journey towards change.

A take-over of the gallery will start from 20 June.

22-24 June will see drop-in and planned workshops and production.

26 June from 7pm – Exhibition opening of the LIFE HACKING projects at KZNSA Gallery.

Exhibition closes 1 July at 12.00.

Projects include:

FREE SUNSHINE! by Miranda Moss- South Africa Thulile Gamedze (South Africa) and Oliver Walkhoff (Switzerland) funded by Pro Helvetia

The World After Us / Server Farms by Nathaniel Stern in collaboration with Jenna Marti, Josh Passon, Olivia Overturf, Mary Widener, and Samantha Tan (USA)

PS2 –Trails of Memory by Michael Bretram, Fabian Büntig, Ivana Druzetic, Magdalena Kovarik, Janna Lichter, Anastasia Treskunov, Christoph Vogel (PS2 team members of the University of Applied Sciences Duesseldorf, Germany)

Gambiologia: life hacking in Art and Design by Fred Paulino (Brazil)

Curating in the in Between by Beryl Graham and Alexandra Ross

Hybrid Happenstances (UNDER 40 Degrees) by Cecilia Vilca and Francesco Mariotti with José-Carlos Mariátegui, Elisa Arca / ATA – Alta tecnología andina

Creating Binocular Rivalry in Virtual Reality by Mert Akbal

Protest & Art: Intersection*ology by  Lori Hepner and Kendra Ross

Turbidity Paintings: Water Testing at the Umgeni River with Thomas Asmuth, University of West Florida and Sara Gevurtz, Hastings College

Art and Science: Intersection Across Contexts by Sarah Cook and Alistair Floyd; Anastasia Koch and Ed Young.

Floating Reverie by Carly Whitaker

Exhibition curated by Marcus Neustetter – artistic director ISEA2018

The People’s Smart Sculpture (PS2) is a creative research, art and innovation project about the cultural evolution of future European smart cities. PS2 was invited by ISEA2018 Durban, South Africa, to implement more than 15 conference talks, 10 workshops and 11 digital art activities in context of the people´s participation in their development of the urban sphere. The project aims to foster participative art and collaborative urban art & culture processes in Europe’s cross-cultural city spaces. The approach works on two levels: the implementation of cultural participation projects by artists, creatives and researchers; and the ongoing optimization of the art and participatory aspects of these projects through reflection and evaluation through participation in a workshop series. We integrate diverse groups of people into a practical dimension of re-design of the urban environment through the workshops. Coordinated by Martin Koplin. Art activities curated by Martin Koplin and Marcus Neustetter.

Supported by Xenorama, M2C Institute, Partnerschaft Bremen-Durban e.V., Creative Europe Programme of EU.

Fracture Zone conjures artists from Brazil and South Africa to dialogue as duos over shared subjects.The exhibition is part of the project Conversations in Gondwana, that evokes the common genealogies between Africa and South America as it seeks to instigate a virtual and at times physical correspondence among artists in order to experience perspectives, poetics, aesthetics and common or dissonant processes that will eventually trigger a series of events, works and conversations on both sides of the tectonic plates.

Post-colonial displacements, enlaced hidden histories, decolonial imaginaries, the friction between human and natural processes through abusive resource exploitation, representations of symbolic cultural expressions, urban dynamics of exclusion, political and social reflections are some of the themes present at the exhibition. Documenting a dialogue in process, we evidence some common fractures, affects, languages, epistemologies, from both sides of this geological accident.