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Hello and welcome back, everyone.
Next up online for arts and culture
is Incarnates Inc.
Is the head curator of Hot Dragomir
meeting. Couldn't find endorsement and
she runs an amazing program there.
I was there last time for an exhibition
on Brutalism, and today
she's going to introduce us to offer
futurism and the exhibition
tech warm.
Welcome for and.
Thanks, it's amazing to be here.
I hope you can hear me and
the technology is working, so I'm
going to briefly introduce you to
Afro tech and the future of reinvention.
It's an exhibition that is currently
on view at in the area
at be until
late April, and
it's just a lot of gold
in the exhibition.
So what's the exhibition about?
The exhibition, Afro Tech and the Future
of Reinvention puts Afrofuturism
in dialog with alternative
technological solutions and imaginations,
the speculative narratives unfolding
in the artworks on display.
I will talk about them later, confronted
with actual inventions from magazines
and different African countries.
This creates a double shift of
perspective, while the artworks
project a
double shift of sorry.
While the artworks project decidedly
African and diasporic science fiction
visions, the real devices
appear as evidence of a technological
development that is already
underway.
The exhibition thus presents Africa
as a continent of technological
innovation, and I will explain to
you later why this is so
why we do this.
This is just an overview of
the artists and the exhibition.
20 artists and
12 tech projects in
the exhibition. They are presented
together.
And I will also explain later.
How come that this is so
before I talk about the exhibition and
go a little bit more deeply
into the.
Into the contents,
I want to tell you a little bit more
about the research I
did before
doing this exhibition and
the research that was really crucial
for developing this project.
So in 2014,
with my colleague on the back, Na, who
was a design professor at
the University of Applied Arts and
Sciences and Codebook,
and who has been researching
a lot and make
up spaces and magazines and
so on, we traveled to
three countries of.
That big continent.
So we went to Kenya
at the eastern coast.
We went to South Africa.
The southern coast.
And we went to Nigeria.
In order to research what people
were doing with technology.
This was the first local which Honor
developed, I think it's a really
beautiful logo, obviously
shows you the
silhouette, the continent
with a wheel,
which is very important a satellite
dish, a helicopter, rotor
surveillance camera, flashlights
and also something
like a cable that looks like
an elephant's mouth.
So when we started, we had certain
ideas and
wishes.
We wanted to look at the use, the
adaptation and the reinvention
or invention of technologies,
new technologies in those three
African countries.
And it was very import into interesting
because in two thousand and fourteen
before going there, we also
looked read a lot of stuff
on the internet.
For example, this there was this
interesting article
by Ethan Zuckerman.
Africa's hackers are today's world
class tech innovators,
which was published in Wired, for
example.
Then there was a very and I'm just
pointing you to these articles.
In case you are interested in looking
at who is writing about
technology in Africa,
what African?
Who's actually Eric Hosemann from
Nairobi?
He is running this blog
where you can find lots of really
interesting
entries.
This is a very interesting and important
guy, Emeka Okafor.
He is part of a very big family
from Nigeria.
And he he
emigrated to the US.
He's living in New York City, and
he is one of the people who
started the Make Up for Africa
project, and he also ran
the Make Up for Africa in Lagos
and 2012.
So his
online project was called Timbuktu
Chronicles, so you might want to check
out what he's writing there.
This is just a really beautiful
poster of the 2012
Mac of Africa and Lagos,
which gave us a lot of ideas
actually where to start our research
and where to where to
look at. And OK, that's another
rather funny article one
to become an internet billionaire.
Move to Africa from 2011
already, and the map actually
shows you the projected
undersea cables in
May 2013.
I'm not going to go
to radio all of this just
to tell you why we wrote a kind of
essay Q before we went
because we wanted to
make very clear what we were interested
in and what not.
And just to give you an idea.
We we were interested in people doing
strange things with technology.
Electricity software.
Those who are not contending themselves
with corporate solutions designed
for the global north and who are out of
this dissatisfaction
are starting to work to develop their own
solutions.
So that's what
we were looking for.
That's just the first.
My first impression of Nairobi
and the things
on people we met were quite
amazing. For example, here in
Nairobi, in Kenya, we
met this Erik Hersman,
a white African
who had at that time been developing
the first
internet server that could work without
electricity or without constant
power connection, which is something
very important in Africa.
Because in
some countries and or, let's say, in many
countries, the constant power failures
and many people, of course, use
power generators
which consume a lot of
gasoline
in order to become independent off
of those power cuts.
And so this with this little machine, I
mean, with with a laptop like this, it's
not a not a problem because
it can kind of survive two hours,
three hours without electricity, but
the servers for internet connectivity
can't. And so that's why they developed
this machine, which has a built
in battery.
Are you basically somebody else
I met in South
Africa
is has developed this project
robo hand.
And the guy who invented who invented
the project is Richard from
us, from South Africa.
You can see him in the yellow T-shirt.
He actually used to work as a carpenter,
and at some point in 2011
or so he had a serious accident.
He kind of cut off half
of his hand.
And so when he
went to the hospital and, you
know, had to face
medical treatment, he suddenly
realized that he basically
could not pay for
for an artificial limb artificial
hand. So he decided to make one
himself.
And at that time, 3D printing
was just up
on the horizon, and he
invented a solution for himself.
But then in the process of
making this fully mechanical
nor non electrical hand
which is fully functional, he realized
that the solution could not only
maybe work for him, but also
for others. And so that's
when he decided to
put the files online.
And they're accessible for anybody who
has a 3D printer, basically, and they can
be adapted to
to the individual needs.
The screen one is a hand
that we printed out for the exhibition
in and document.
OK, the Flying Flying Donkey
Challenge contest was
also quite popular at the time.
I think they kind of discontinued
it because of several
bomb attacks, and they could not
follow up on this.
But the idea, basically,
when you don't have infrastructure, roads
and stuff, why not, you know,
use transport drones?
Another very interesting project
is a
project that was presented at the
make of Africa in Lagos in 2012.
It's a project by four schoolgirls
who built a generator.
That's a power generator, which
is not running on gasoline, but which
is running on urine.
And apparently you can produce
six hours of electricity
with one liter of urine.
They were about to install it into
their school system, so
just to give you some ideas
that resulted from this research trip.
Very often I have the feeling
OK, there is a serious lack of
infrastructure, a serious lack of
material, you know, infrastructure.
There's no not a cash
machine at every street corner.
There's maybe not roads
that are kind of good enough to to
to be used on an everyday basis.
So there's really a serious lack of
physical infrastructure.
And what I noticed is that it's
not about catching up, but
somehow it's about jumping
over, right?
It's about going directly to the next
level.
So going directly
wireless.
And
I guess some of you know that
many of you should might know that
M-Pesa was introduced very
early on.
It's it's a
way of paying with your mobile phone
without the need of having a bank
account.
Um, of course, the usage
of mobile telephony
was very, very widespread
in Africa.
And so
a lot of a lot of ideas suddenly
somehow became very
virulent, so to speak,
out of this idea of jumping to the next
level.
For the project, it meant
that,
you know, what's what I had seen in those
three countries somehow
did not correspond to
what you usually see in the media,
on television or in the newspaper
you always read about as
the next famine, as poverty, there's
hunger, crop regimes
and so on. It's suddenly all exists.
Definitely.
But there's also
something else.
When we had the opening of the
exhibition, I said, That's normality in
Africa, you know?
And so that's why
we decided to present Africa
as the continent of technological
innovation. It's a it's a different way
of sort of
a different kind of extreme.
So you might not you might wonder, how
does Afrofuturism
come into the game for a long time?
I did not know what to do with these
findings. You know,
I was very unsure how to develop
the whole project further.
And then I started talking to a colleague
of mine,
Fabian Saavedra, Lava
and he
because some I had the feeling I'm
missing a kind of narrative.
OK, this idea of jumping
to the next level, it's a nice idea.
But. Hmm.
And the idea of presenting Africa
as a continent of technological
innovation is also quite interesting.
But somehow there was a lack of
narrative.
So.
Fabian T,
he suggested to look
at Afrofuturism, so what does
Afrofuturism? Afrofuturism is clearly
not something that comes from Africa,
interestingly, but
it's, let's say, science
fiction narrative
that
started that developed in the 19th,
let's say, the 1950s in the US.
So it's Afro-American
culture.
And one of the protagonists is
actually a Sun Ra jazz musician
who always claimed to
be from the planet Saturn,
not from the planet Earth, but
from Saturn. And
as you can see, he he loved dressing
up like, like a pharaoh.
So those two references were
very important.
The reference to
ancient Egypt.
So let's say a high culture in
Africa and at the same
time, the reference to space to outer
space.
And these are two very important
references for Afrofuturism because
and you will find these references in
and in
many, let's say, science fiction
stories narratives.
So when you're being denied
your own place in the present time,
Afrofuturism has been looking for
alternative spaces
and also times.
So that's why space
is an alternative place.
And also, let's say
they're moving into the future all into
the very faraway past is
a is an option
became important and Afrofuturism.
So maybe you have wondered why we have
such a very strange design.
See,
on the right hand side, it's the building
we are located in.
It's the DODMAN, are you?
It's the former Union Brewery
and it has this beautiful
logo on top of the roof,
which obviously stands for Union, the
beer brand.
But our design designers
actually found as parallel in
in sunrise
had handled, let's say.
So that's why we actually
developed this,
this design.
So let me tell you a little bit
about the exhibition.
So John Accom falls
short and experimental documentary
film The Last Angel of History
examines the relationships between
pan-African culture,
science fiction, intergalactic
travel and rapidly developing
computer technology.
The short film notes
from the Ghanaian director,
Francis Perdomo, looks
at the real history of a planned
space program in Zambia
of the 1960s,
a time at which political utopias
encountered technological progress.
And this is actually the story of
17 year old girl in Zambia
who are supposed
to be sent to the Moon
kill one JKIA.
And thus photographs show
futuristic architectures
in the Angolan capital of
Luanda.
The artists and reinterprets those
postcolonial buildings
in e-cars. 13 into
proof of the first African
journey to the Sun.
Kabbani Kavango
in her son, Ron repatriation project
has the goal of
bringing Sandra back to his actual planet
of origin sat on
Sun Ra, who died in 1993,
was a jazz musician who claimed to
originate from the planet Saturn and
represented the philosophy of the Astral
Black with
which confirmed his extraterrestrial
origin.
So in this video, she
actually interviews
a lot of scientists,
some of them involved in the city
program.
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
How to prove
is there a way to prove that Sandra
really returned to his planet of
origin
and she actually manages to
prove it? Obviously.
Taking the work of the cosmic jazz
musician roar again
as a starting point, the speculative
narrative of Soda Jerk
examines the connection between science
fiction
and social policy and the Black Atlantic
music culture in
the exhibition.
Afro Black Astro
Black is presented as a two
channel video installation with four
episodes alternate alternating
between the two screens.
So this was these were
this was a selection of projects that
deal with outer space space travel.
Then we also have a lot of projects
that deal with a sea where the deep sea
was the Atlantic,
um and, uh,
going to present you two or three
of those.
So Alexia, the legendary
Detroit techno duo Axiom
developed imaginary worlds inspired
by Afrofuturism, and many concept
albums
in their releases for Axiom
is also the name of a legendary city
beneath the sea.
This afro futuristic
afro would arrest Atlantis
as populated by the descendants
of pregnant women that were
taken as slaves from various
countries of Africa and thrown
overboard and murdered
during the crossing of the Atlantic,
according to the legend.
The unborn children, their unborn
children, survived and the
womb and developed the ability
to breathe and live underwater.
They founded an unknown underwater
civilization that was in possession
of utopian technologies.
The South Africa based artist Tabitha
Fraser deals with the sea as a storehouse
for pain, lost stories
and memories in the era of colonialism
and, deep down, tidal.
That's the work we will see here.
Sorry.
While it also contains
the deep sea, it also contains the global
infrastructure of our present day
telecommunications within it.
So she really follows.
She actually overlays.
She finds a parallel between
the undersea and
the undersea telecommunication cables
and the roots of the slave ships
that have traveled from western Africa
to the so-called New World.
The filmmaker, Simon, let's zoom
on, look at my arm and his film
direction, but you can also
see tonight
takes up the myth of the same name in
order to use the methods of science
fiction to turn off the images
circulating in media
today and about discussion
of the refugee crisis.
Another film that you can also see
tonight saw tonight is a video
program of three films,
which I will show you
slide.
This is actually a Naked Reality
by Jean-Pierre Bigelow.
It's an Afro futurist science fiction
film located 150 years
in the future, the cities
of Africa have grown together to form a
gigantic, dystopian metropolis and the
film of the Cameroonian filmmaker,
the protagonist Juanito, leaves
the house one morning, not knowing that
her first prayer to the
ancestors has initiated her
journey to see a world,
a world one cannot see.
Louise Henderson That's the third film
you can see tonight.
Let's do Vuong.
Let US Off! This year is a film
essay that uses documentary
methods to tell of separatism
and technology in present
day Ghana.
The narrative of the film revolves around
a mysterious practice known as
Sakubva Internet
Scam, fraudulent mass
emails that is enriched
with voodoo magic.
This
fabulous Monty Hall
comments
is a Belgian Beninese photographer
comments on environmental destruction
in various regions of Africa and his
photographic work.
The prophecy in his images,
he stages fantastic entities.
He has designed together with a designer
to see from Dakar
and apocalyptic landscapes where
showing four of these pictures here.
I only show you one, and this is
obviously dealing with
computer trash.
I'm slowly coming to an end.
The tech projects I told you in the
beginning, we have 12 tech projects in
the exhibition
that cover a very wide variety
of areas.
I already told you about BRIC
Kenya from Kenya, which
is an internet server that also ensures
access to the internet even without
a stable power supply.
M-Pesa from Kenya is a cash
free method of paying
off payment that functions
via mobile telephone,
for which one receives no requires,
no bank account.
And there's the project.
All cover up from
Germany. I mean, the people who develop
it, they are working in Germany and
and in Africa.
Vukovar pay means as much as Where
are you? It's an innovative
address app that
reliable viably also finds locations
and areas without an existing address
system.
Another important area is that of
health and medicine.
I already told you I showed you a robot
hand robot hand
that provides prostheses, fingers,
hands and legs for printing
out oneself for the 3D
printer at a fraction of
the price of conventional medical
prostheses.
Gifted Mom is an app that provides
expecting mothers with useful information
and contributes to sexual education.
Berry from Algeria combats
hunger through innovative use
of the expiration dates
of food products.
This could also be quite interesting for
here.
The inventor Oscar like plenty
more, he wants to avoid
food waste.
And then there's a project called
Carnivore Pads that helps with medical
diagnosis in areas with low
populations and
creates a direct connection with medical
specialists,
do Akalis Corp.
from Kenya is a completely functional
microscope from the field 3D
printing and
the shooting could happen. That's the
last image I would like to show.
You should look it up.
And this is Henry Henry Niko,
owner from London.
He built it's a
kind of solar kiosk which
can be used for which people
can use for recharging their
mobile phones and mobile devices.
And Henry, he also came to
Dortmund. We had a one week festival
and we invited invited several
of the the inventors
and Henry.
He told me because he built
these kiosks.
And he kind of friends them out to
people so people can rent them and they
can make money on recharging telephones.
And he told me, Oh, I'm
not employing young men.
I'm especially I'm
a really. I want to work with the young
women, especially young mothers, because
they
they feel very responsible.
So he's he's
predominantly employing young
mothers
to run these kiosks.
So if you're interested in more stuff,
there's a travel blog.
Obviously, there's a video about the
exhibition.
There have been some very interesting,
very interesting press
covering coverage of
the film screening.
I would like to point you to
this every night from tonight at
10 O'Clock in the video lounge.
It's those three films,
and I would like to thank you for your
attention, and I'm here for
questions and
answers, obviously.
Thank you.
Bill, thanks a lot.
Just one remark, the wheel arches and the
Adam play area over there
and also for those of you interested.
All of Sunrays albums are freely
available on iPhone culture than that,
and I think it would be a perfect thing
to do after Congress to zone out of
it.
The.