I acted as curator for 2nd Season for the Centre for the Less Good Idea which ran between July and October 2017, with the Season Finale in October. I co-curated the Season alongside Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Jamal Nxedlana, who’s awe inspiring work I will not cover in this post, but please see the Less Good Idea website for their contributions on of the 2nd Season.
As a digital artist and curator within an African based art and technology practices, I invited into the Season a small group of technologically and digitally inclined creative developers and engineers: mechatronic engineers Bushveld Labs, VR Specialitys Alt Reality (now Eden Labs), composer and electronic musician Cameron Harris and writer and director Mwenya Kabwe.
Mwenya Kabwe’s series of short short African science fiction ‘prompts’ where used in the pre Season workshops to explore thinking towards African science fictions. While Bushveld Labs and Alt Reality, introduced Seasons to a range of creative technologies – most prominently AR and VR. The results of this curatorial grouping led to an incredible series of augmented and virtual reality collaborations driven by Rick Treweek and Gareth Steele in further collaboration with James Gaydon Dondoo in what was to become the Invisible Exhibition.
The exploration of Kabwe’s prompts where taken up by Nhlanhla Mahlangu in an interrogation of magic, play and technology in . Kabwe herself developing an extended version of A Zambian Space Odyssey for the Season. Cameron Harris’s sound work began infiltrating a number of the works across the season and can be heard through out. I further collaborated with William Kentridge to build the software for his collaborative performance titled Splash. Kabwe, Harris and I further developed an experimental collaboration with performers Sonia Radebe and Tshego Khutsoane titled Jacaranda Time – a data driven performed poem drawing on Kabwe’s poetic prompts.
Photo’s by Stella Oliver from the www.lessgoodidea.com
