9 Colours focuses on investigating how
the digital space is a space for artists to experiment and play, to iterate and
repeat, to copy and paste. These concepts draw and rely on behaviours specific
to the digital space, to social media and the internet - such as: liking,
sharing and commenting, creating and making. Using the framework provided by
different platforms such as timeline content, images, posts, videos, filters,
stories, reels and lives, the way in which the exhibition is curated is
inspired by these formats and behaviours.
Our presence online is heavily associated
with these behaviours which become habitual, repetitive, contextual and performative
for people using these platforms. In a curatorial context, these behaviours
become this for the artists and viewers of the digital exhibition as the works
are revealed progressively. These behaviours allow digital artworks to be
visible and accessible, and also acquired through NFTs. NFTs are currently a
much-debated system and mechanism, this exhibition encouraged artists to
respond critically - as a system, to their processes and procedures (eg.
Minting etc). Artists were invited to select one colour and submit work in
response to the above concepts and ideas.
Aluta Null
Brooklyn J. Pakathi
MJ Turpin
Naadira Patel
Nathan Gates
Brooklyn J. Pakathi
MJ Turpin
Naadira Patel
Nathan Gates
The exhibition exists in three different capacities – first was on Artpool an online curatorial tool and NFT platform, second was on Instagram on the Blue Ocean account and lastly, the final iteration and destination is online, on the Blue Ocean digital art space.
Carly Whitaker
Io Makandal
issi_issa
Marcus Neustetter
Io Makandal
issi_issa
Marcus Neustetter
FUTURISTIC
TASTEMAKER CONNOISSEUR consist
of a video documenting the blog titled FUTURISTIC
TASTEMAKER CONNOISSEUR and a QR code which links to the blog.
Set in an old Tumblr blog, FUTURISTIC TASTEMAKER CONNOISSEUR (AI-generated name) is an attempt at bringing light to a slightly silent aspect of social media's latest plague, Digital Blackface. However, the hushed strand that is being tackled is the co-opting, by white social media users, of language and inside jokes birthed by Black people on the internet (more specifically Black women and Black queer people).
FTC embraces and critiques both the behaviours on social media and the participatory nature in meme culture. Paying homage to The Read podcast, FTC uses extracts from the witty, engaging, and unapologetically Black show. Reaction gifs and memes built from out-of-context The Read quotes paired with snippets from reality TV shows are what create a slew of distorted and confusing Tumblr posts that highlight the puzzling nature of what occurs in examples of Digital Blackface.
By scanning the QR code viewers can access the live blog FUTURISTIC TASTEMAKER CONNOISSEURTumblr blog. The blog is continuously updated and adds to the ideas, humour and Black community they originate from which the artist is exploring in the video.
Set in an old Tumblr blog, FUTURISTIC TASTEMAKER CONNOISSEUR (AI-generated name) is an attempt at bringing light to a slightly silent aspect of social media's latest plague, Digital Blackface. However, the hushed strand that is being tackled is the co-opting, by white social media users, of language and inside jokes birthed by Black people on the internet (more specifically Black women and Black queer people).
FTC embraces and critiques both the behaviours on social media and the participatory nature in meme culture. Paying homage to The Read podcast, FTC uses extracts from the witty, engaging, and unapologetically Black show. Reaction gifs and memes built from out-of-context The Read quotes paired with snippets from reality TV shows are what create a slew of distorted and confusing Tumblr posts that highlight the puzzling nature of what occurs in examples of Digital Blackface.
By scanning the QR code viewers can access the live blog FUTURISTIC TASTEMAKER CONNOISSEURTumblr blog. The blog is continuously updated and adds to the ideas, humour and Black community they originate from which the artist is exploring in the video.
DATA IS
BEAUTIFUL allows viewers to see
their own reflection through the chaos of a pathfinding algorithm. This
pathfinding algorithm originally developed in the 1960s, the artist takes the
output of these experiments and adapts the colours to reference the colours,
speed and loop.
This piece highlights the beauty in the people who peruse through social media platforms and find themselves as the subject, study, and life of them.
ALUTA NULL
This piece highlights the beauty in the people who peruse through social media platforms and find themselves as the subject, study, and life of them.
ALUTA NULL
MJ Turpin
Brooklyn J. Pakathi
Mixed media collage employing text and
photographs, cut on the editing room, scanned and then redigitized. The series
draws upon a gestural action of longing and prolonging. Through the relatedness
of distance, pain catalyzes a moment of disruption, it wholes itself within and
breaks through the fissures.
What is the image in the digital age? They come and go, instantly consumed, filtered, disappear. The image is an instant, no one really look as at an image online. in the act of scrolling the image becomes a blur of colours in vague forms. On thinking about liminal spaces, the digital realm becomes a type of commons, a digital third space / third landscape. The colour that comes to mind is a maroon associated to the amaranth, a plant I have been thinking / working with for a while. It grows abundantly in the physical third landscape across Johannesburg. This image taken from one of those sites alludes to it. Images shared / posted in the online space become abstracted, location-less, timeless entering into a kind of entropy and collapsing of time and place. I like that. For me, in a way the third landscape in digital terms would be decentralised networks – a hybrid space for novel things to occur.
Io Makandal
Marcus Neustetter
Marcus Neustetter draws from his existing body of work, reinventing moments in search for meaning as he
enters his ideas into the inspiring and unpredictable behaviour of the NFT context.
Part 1: The Prospecting Loop…
The human comes into being with first light and builds a condition for embodied survival, the human landscape. Once established and growing, we realise the current state will not be enough, we build vertical portals in search of more. In this process we forget the need for balance and face the consequence and collapse. We feel that our only option is to look beyond and continue with our vertical prospecting until we find a condition that lends itself to replicate our systems again with the first light… The Prospecting Loop, takes us through a series of provocations that evolve as drawings: - first light - human landscape - vertical portals - consequence and collapse - vertical prospecting - pulsate in a looped rhythm that represents the artist’s question of our motivation to prospect new conditions and territories. In the context of this exhibition and project, he reflects on his own history of working between the digital and physical and poses himself the question of the new loop that he is about to start. Ink drawings, barely dry and constantly shifting on handmade paper become a stop frame animation loop that positions itself as a new form of prospecting - the NFT.
Part 1: The Prospecting Loop…
The human comes into being with first light and builds a condition for embodied survival, the human landscape. Once established and growing, we realise the current state will not be enough, we build vertical portals in search of more. In this process we forget the need for balance and face the consequence and collapse. We feel that our only option is to look beyond and continue with our vertical prospecting until we find a condition that lends itself to replicate our systems again with the first light… The Prospecting Loop, takes us through a series of provocations that evolve as drawings: - first light - human landscape - vertical portals - consequence and collapse - vertical prospecting - pulsate in a looped rhythm that represents the artist’s question of our motivation to prospect new conditions and territories. In the context of this exhibition and project, he reflects on his own history of working between the digital and physical and poses himself the question of the new loop that he is about to start. Ink drawings, barely dry and constantly shifting on handmade paper become a stop frame animation loop that positions itself as a new form of prospecting - the NFT.
Part 2: Perspectives of Unknown Territories
Perspectives of unknown Territories is an attempt to give form to the artist’s uncertainty of the new terrain he is traversing by drawing from his dialogue with a space object that is meant to give perspective and direction. Satellite images taken from South African observation satellite SumbandilaSat (2009-2011) from somewhere over Africa present the foundation for this animation artwork of 10 images. Territories are cropped, coloured and enhanced to chart a speculated journey and an unknown perspective back on earth.
Perspectives of unknown Territories is an attempt to give form to the artist’s uncertainty of the new terrain he is traversing by drawing from his dialogue with a space object that is meant to give perspective and direction. Satellite images taken from South African observation satellite SumbandilaSat (2009-2011) from somewhere over Africa present the foundation for this animation artwork of 10 images. Territories are cropped, coloured and enhanced to chart a speculated journey and an unknown perspective back on earth.
Part 3: A Call for Hope
.-.. . .- -.. / - .... . / .-- .- -.-- / .- --. .- .. -.
.-.. . .- -.. / - .... . / .-- .- -.-- / .- --. .- .. -.
Carly Whitaker
The colour red was selected as the tribute to the memory of the dialogic form made in collaboration with ‘Anne-Marie’ in 2018, as the both the foundation and infant base at which the heart of the memory of the moment; one of masks and media mania and of everything to yet take place, the embedded form ‘RED’ has held true as the hieroglyphic token to which sanity and survival could become attached and on which the portrait of the Apologist rests in reverse.
The portrait of a prototype rejected with a rainbow beaming through vision, asking ‘why was this not a time to innovate in the methods of breathing ?’ We would all be ready to finally depart together to the new - yet somehow we are - we wandered around the digital spaces, squandered time with data or without and maintained what we could of the fragments of what was - we learnt, all of us in some way or another - about something other and something of the self.
The work celebrates the Mother and the Mask in memory of the mothers who died at the hands of murderers and the masks that mediated messages into new formats of expression and also as an augmented channel ‘red’ where the heart energy of love, passion and politics lives embedded - changing and fluctuating according to the season or mood or moment - and the looping repeat of an apology never uttered over the aged centuries.
issi_issa
issi_issa
Nathan Gates