Add to your #longreads C:\>Core Dump A Reflection by Francois Knoetze and Oulimata Gueye on ART AFRICA Brilliant work was lucky to see Fak'ugesi Festival artafricamagazine.org/ccore-dump/?v=…

Teaser for our new project 'The Subterranean Imprint Archive' which examines the hybrid forms of power embedded in technological artefacts, systems and practices. video by Francois Knoetze

Shinkolobwe is a mine in the Katanga region of the DRC. In 1940, a Belgian Industrialist shipped over 1250 tonnes of uranium from Shinkolobwe to New York, where it was bought by the Manhattan Project and used to create the Atom Bomb. #newwork video by Francois Knoetze

'Alternative visions require alternative archives' - Achille Mbembe. How do we think about the precariousness of archives in the global south? Part of this work is regarding colonial archives as Artefacts of Uncertainty/Records of Doubt #TheSubterraneanImprintArchive

South Africa has a long and shrouded history of entanglement with the nuclear. Apartheid govt was determined to make South Africa a leading producer of uranium globally. B.J Vorster, SA’s former PM declared its nuclear project an “obvious step in the history of the nation”.

In times of crisis, future prediction emerges out of a desire to govern complexity&chaos.And yet, although our technological capacity, access to data and interpreting capability has substantially increased, our ability to comprehend our current situation remains beyond our reach.

Tech Solutionism: in the context of the pandemic, access to data that can predict the future of the virus is NB. But failure to view pure tech solutions critically disregards that technologies are complex systems which can disrupt AND reinscribe oppressive power relations.

Teju Cole, on the voiding of Snapchat records: '…just as nothing can be permanently retained, nothing is ever really gone. Somewhere out there, perhaps in the Cloud or in some clandestine server, is the optical afterimage of our interaction: the faces, the shoes, the texts.'

Can African countries shape our own digital destiny? Foreign powers have long used technology as a means of intervention,surveillance and exerting power over African countries. US computer companies like IBM played a strategic role in providing tech to enable the apartheid regime

Foregrounding concerns around Big Data and privacy, the technologies of global surveillance capitalism, the cementing of tech hegemony helps us to think about the ways Digital Colonialism is operating in the contemporary moment. #4IR

South African politicians’ unbridled enthusiasm for the so-called ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ (4IR) speaks to an attitude of technological solutionism which is uncritical of the underlying power structures at work. #digitalart #4IR

soil: the much-excavated, much-exploited site of the contemporary technological moment / burial ground of electronic waste / where a ‘new geological layer of technological rubbish’ is being laid / scattered with ‘dead media’ / ‘zombie media’ (Parikka, A Geology of Media)

items that contained uranium: 'Fiestaware' dinnerware (30s-60s), dentures (!) (from '40s). what qualifies as a 'natural resource' is shaped by technology and culture's. how did a highly sensitive material of national security become a banal traded commodity? #technopolitics

What can we discover by reading the earth itself as an archive? Okwui Enwezor:'the archive of a society,a culture or a civilization cannot be described exhaustively...it emerges in fragments, regions, levels.'South Africa's subterranean 'regions' tell a story of power&complicity.

To live in the world today is to live under, and within a cloud – a cloud both architectural and infrastructural. The cloud = climate,connection,consequence. Investigating the sites of data centres & undersea cables tell us about the real disposition of power. #technopolitics

#newwork

nuclear fictions & mythologies: Accessing the archive of sources related to South Africa’s nuclear history is notoriously difficult. Due to the secrecy of the state, primary sources are often inaccessible. Were most documents destroyed? How do we address these archival silences?

As we enter Level 3, remember: on average, police kill someone every single day in SA, lockdown or no. For sustained, data driven coverage on #policebrutality follow Viewfinder

a short video we made for Viewfinder on #policebrutality in South Africa. Follow them for sustained, data driven coverage.

South African Atomic Enthusiasm - Shiny visions of Africa’s technofuture Digital collage source: The first National Party government under South African Prime Minister Daniel Francois Malan in 1948. The government established the Atomic Energy Board a year later. #technopolitics