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TA 12 (2+3) pp. 185196 Intellect Limited 2014

Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research Volume 12 Numbers 2 & 3

2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/tear.12.2-3.185_1

TabiTa RezaiReIndependent artist-film-maker

afro cyber resistance: South african internet art

abSTRacTLooking at the digitalculturalpolitical means of resistance and media activism on the Internet, this article explores Internet art practices in South Africa as a manifes-tation of cultural dissent towards western hegemony online. Confronting the unilat-eral flow of online information, Afro Cyber Resistance is a socially engaged gesture aiming to challenge the representation of the African body and culture through online project. Talking as examples the WikiAfrica project, Cuss Groups interven-tion Video Party 4 (VP4) and VIRUS SS 16 by artiste Bogosi Sekhukhuni, this article attempts to demonstrate that the use of the Internet as a medium for digital cultural production and as a platform of dissemination is crucial to raise social awareness and defy African stereotypes and misrepresentation. Creating a unique visual language using the global aesthetics of the Internet, yet rooted in African culture, these works deeply reflect on the social environment they spawn from and therefore act as cultural and visual resistance.

Is Africa to be found on that server?404 Error Not Found1

Africa for the rest of the world, i.e. the western world, is still either seen as an unknown land, a place of fantasy and exotic projection, or a landscape of misery, poverty, warfare and disease. As the new outbreak of Ebola came through in West Africa, Africa is once again under the projector for the world

KeywoRdSAfricaInternetartresistanceglobalcyberculture

1. This statement paraphrases an action by The Electronic Disturbance Theatre. Using the URL-based software FloodNet, the group operated a virtual sit-in against Mexico City financial institutions websites and momentarily blocked them. The FloodNet system would ask, Is there justice on this system? And

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to pity. What is flagrant and worrying is the latent racism that black people and especially Africans are subjected to, which goes in pair with the cultural imperialism that we are all submitted to in all forms of media.

It is the year 2014; the utopia of the Internet as a place of freedom and expres-sion where everyone could contribute equally to its content and challenge dominant discourses and traditional forms of media propaganda is unfortu-nately still to be realized as the web repeats and reinforce the old systems of exploitation. As Ricardo Dominguez, the founder of Electronic Disturbance Theatre, puts it: the Internet is the Wild West (2002: 393). Indeed, the West controls the Internet, in terms of domain ownership, content input and data utilization, while Africa remains the least visible continent on the Internet. The fantasized global online culture is still mainly a one-way flow, from them to the rest of the world. Considering the Global South context, we can ask ourselves if the Internet is a colonized space, and if we are still victims of a hegemonic power. How can culture have an impact on this social divide and misrepresentation? And can the Internet still be a space for dissent?

As for this January 2014, Internet penetration in Africa was of 18%, a 5% growth from last years 13%, yet it is still the lowest in the world. The majority of the Internet users are in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa, while in some African countries the Internet reaches less than 1% of the popula-tion, mainly because of the lack of affordable and accessible Internet. Active Social network users represent only 7% of the continent. The consumption of Internet in Africa is mainly operated through mobile connection, with mobile penetration of 67% on the continent; still the mobile broadband penetration is of only 7%.2 This global digital divide is one of the reasons behind the unequal flow of information online.

Although the technological gap is worrying, the path is growing fast and where the connectivity is at an acceptable level, important and necessary initiatives are happening online to disrupt the loud absence of the African Continent on the Wild World Web. Examining the politics of culture online, this article explores cultural resistance by South African artists using the Internet as a platform and medium to produce and disseminate radical and

Figure 1: Afro Cyber Resistance by Tabita Rezaire.

the system responds, Justice is not to be found on this server. Is democracy to be found on this server? Democracy is not to be found on this server.

2. http://wearesocial.net/tag/africa/, accessed 3 November 2014.


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critical practices. Taking as examples of this African digital dynamism the Wikiafrica project, CussGroups Video Party and Bogosi Sekhukhunis Virus SS 16, I am hoping to give an insight into South African cultural practices on the Internet and its relevance as a social gesture of digital decolonizing.

South Africa is celebrating twenty years of Democracy, and as the post-apartheid society is still heavily affected by its divided past, the art scene is booming and gaining international recognition. Art as a form of resistance has a long and diverse history and many South Africans artists are engaging this path, addressing the complex issues of the newborn South African soci-ety. As Tegan Bristow noted Internet Art has a history of political criticism, activism and hacktivism (Bristow 2011: 298). Not surprisingly, the few South African artists using the Internet as a medium and platform for their work engage, I believe, in cultural and social resistance. Internet Art scene is rela-tively small in South Africa, but some of its practitioners are acknowledged on a global scale that is the niche of Internet Art, yet not fully embraced by the South African gallery and museum context.

Cultural production in Africa is very rich, but because of a lack of national and regional funding, it relies heavily on international funding schemes. The French and the Goethe Institute are very active throughout the continent and act as the main cultural and artistic funding channels; the writer and film-maker Nana Oforiatta Ayim expresses her concerns:

Looking at their extensive programme of concerts, talks and exhibitions, I felt uncomfortable at the role they were playing in shaping the cultural output of the continent, which seemed dangerously close to that of writing our narratives for us.

(Oforiatta-Ayim 2012: 123)

This offline reality in terms of African cultural content being funded thus selected and disseminated by foreign (western) Institution is mirrored online. As the curator Elvira Dyangani Ose puts it:

Despite the general belief of it being a free information and commu-nication circuit, the Internet is still a system of control, in which major websites operate as exclusive corporations.

(2012: 117)

This power relation is maintained, as the main actors remain the same, and go generally with impunity, letting the unconnected world in a situation of subor-dination. South Africas access to the Internet is way above the 18% aver-age on the continent and reaches 41% of the population in 2014. However, 80.2 % of South African users use their smart phones to access the Internet, whilst 19.8% use traditional methods: household connection, Internet cafe, or connecting through work or university (Effective Measure 2014). This charac-teristic of African connectivity can be seen as limiting, yet it results in interest-ing patterns and relationships with the Internet, and some artists consciously talking this factor into account when producing online-based work.

The Internet is not a place of non-rights, and despite a coercive environ-ment, it is possible to challenge the unilateral and unbalanced relationship that exists between the western connected world and the Global South.

The Cape Town-based collective Chimurenga, experienced the control-ling and geographically biased architecture of the Internet when trying to


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3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Africa,accessed3November2014.

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiAfrica,accessed3November2014.

5. BogosiattachedtohisstatementapdfofThetheoryofpeakadvertisingandthefutureofthewebandalinktoBruceSterlingsvideo:Whatafeeling!

Africanize Wikipedia. Chimurenga are the editors of Chimurenga Magazine, a pan-African publication of culture, art and politics, and other publications. They also engage in online projects such as Chimurenga Library, an online archive of pan-African periodicals, and PMS the Power Money Sex Reader, an online research space images, writing, audio and video. Engaged in cultural African history and theory, they tried multiple times to upload African content onto Wikipedia, so as to Africanize the worlds most visited online encyclo-paedia and fill the lack of information online about the continent. Many of those new articles have been rejected, some because their relevance was not proved, others because the style or tone of those entries was too personal or not deemed appropriate to the worlds most open Internet platform (Dyangani Ose 2012: 117). This is a striking example of how the web is controlled by western concerns and how anything from the southern hemi-sphere and Africa particularly is regarded as secondary.

In 2011, to challenge this conspicuous absence of comprehensive, diverse and accurate information about contemporary and historic Africa, WikiAfrica was launched to heal the sorrow of imperial neglect. WikiAfrica is a collabora-tive project between Africa Center and Lettera 27 aiming at overcoming the lack in information about the African continent available online. WikiAfrica conducted workshops and training for people to access and upload their knowledge into WikiAfrica as a democratic platform of information. The articles focus mainly on cultural production from music, art, literature and cinema. As of 4 November 2014, there are 58,995 articles within the scope of WikiProject Africa.3

On the first page of WikiAfrica you can read:

Africa, with nearly one-billion people, represents the worlds third- largest market after China (1.3-billion) and India (1.1-billion), and is widely recognized as the last frontier for global economic growth. It is also where humanity began. And yet it has the lowest and least informed profile of any region on the Internet; moreover, what does appear is often selective, lacks context and reinforces outdated stere-otypes. Africa deserves a new deal and especially in Wikipedia.4

Even if this endeavour is not thought of or seen as Internet Art per se, it can be understood as an online platform for active social resistance against occidental hegemony and online information control. For this reason I have started the conversation about #AfroCyberResistance with this project as it addresses the general atmosphere of complaisance that exists online towards the non-western world. History needs to be rewritten, readdressed and re-evaluated without the patriarchal-white-imperialist prism of supreme knowledge that is nowadays still prevalent.

This frustration with the controlling facet of the Internet is shared among many. When I asked the South African artist Bogosi Sekhukhuni to comment on the politics of the Internet, he sent me an e-mail with the following statement5:

We need to quickly snap out of the web 2.0 fantasy of the Internet as a promised land for those seeking a greater freedom of expression or livelihood. Whatever visions that ideologically shaped this technology at the beginning of the development of computers, has now success-fully been structurally organized to serve the primary interests of North American governmental bodies and the commercial interests of some of



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6. Source Center for Disease Control and Prevention, http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/case-counts.html, accessed 31 October 2014.

the worlds biggest and wealthiest companies, Google and Facebook. The rapid accumulation of power that these companies have garnered over the past decade is testament to this reality. According to Bruce Sterling, there is no reason to think that this will always be the case and the real interest for me is imagining what tone life on the Internet will take in coming years. Social media dominates Internet usage and so its cultural manifestation is something worthwhile to speculate on. Consumer culture and advertising have been the avenues that have been the source of income on the Internet, along with it, is the spawning of a distinct online visual culture and aesthetic that is thriving and complex.

(Rezaire 2014a)

Bogosi Sekhukhuni is using this online visual culture and aesthetics in his works, often addressing his relationship with social media and their meaning as a cultural space. Sekhukhunis recent work Virus SS 16 (2014) uses the new social platform Newhive as a framework. Newhive is an online platform offer-ing blank canvas where users can drag and drop any content from links, videos, giffs, images, songs and text to create a personalized website-like page. Virus SS 16 tackles the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa, addressing the contamina-tion paranoia and the health contradictions debate surrounding the disease.

As ebola.com just got sold for $200,000 to the Russian company Weed Growth Fund, 49416 deaths have been reported so far and the virus continues to spread, with no real measure in place to prevent this plague. Meanwhile, the world fears the black body more so than it previously did, and racist state-ments, articles and propaganda are spawning and openly disseminated to and from all possible media, from social networks, newspapers, TV or viral memes. Everyday my Facebook feed is filled with bad (racist and derogatory) jokes about Ebola, from a coca-cola-like add Enjoy Ebola to Sexy Ebola nurse outfit for sell or articles coming up with the most absurd comments about the outbreak. Sometimes censorship should be allowed. The western paranoia concerning Ebola is as frightening as it is ridiculous. The writer Maryn McKenna coined the term Ebolanoia and collects incidents of Ebola-paranoia

Figure 2: Virus SS 16 by Bogosi Sekhukhuni.


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7. This comment could also potentially refer to the social media Lookbook where hypters around the world post pictures of their daily outfit.

8. Contagion Clip #5, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyPD4fZHX2I&feature=player_embedded, accessed 26 October 2014.

9. Ebola PPE guidelines urgent need to revise WHO and CDC guidelines, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahBzAn4w-9M, accessed 26 October 2014.

on her Tumblr The further adventures of germ girl (McKenna 2014). Here are some examples of her latest featured posts: Today in #Ebolanoia: MSF confirms panicky US quarantines discouraging aid workers from volunteer-ing; Today in #Ebolanoia: OK teacher must self-quarantine because school parents cant read a map; Today in #Ebolanoia: NYTimes speculates that you can get Ebola from toilet-flushing mist; Today in #Ebolanoia: Boyfriend of force-quarantined nurse forced to give up university classes because hyste-ria. The discourses about Ebola are irrational, although the disease is real and deserves serious consideration.

Bogosi Sekhukhunis work is a digital collage of three videos, giffs and images of the Ebola heath care workers (HCW) wearing their survival outfits. The giff shows two African men with the subtitles I dont believe Ebola is real, with a warning sign blinking Nuclear Ebola. What if it was not real and just an International alliance to control Africas demography? Conspiracy theories set aside, Virus SS 16 through its videos and images selection creates a compelling narrative merging mainstream TV show, academic conferencing and psychic meditation, on a background of health care fashion shoot. Indeed the five photographs used as a background almost looks like a #whitecore #health-goth photoshoot. Sekhukhuni actually released this work on his Facebook page Open Time with the comment I made a look book.7 The work is seen ironically as a fashion campaign for HCWs outfit. One of the images shows two male HCWs (one black, the other white) in their anti-contamination suits. The white HCW is posing proudly, you can see him smiling under his face-mask as if thinking, Look at me, I am so brave, I am saving Africa. The other photographic collages seem taken out of an American TV show starring the Scientific Investigation Division or a science-fiction movie, which emphasize the fictional character of their look or of the global Ebola phenomenon itself.

The first video is an extract of the film Contagion by Steven Soderbergh8 starring Matt Damon as a blogger following a man in quest of information about a contagious virus. While the man is on the phone he surprisingly enumerates Gozilla, King Kong and Frankeinstein. These three fictional characters have often been used in a derogatory manner to describe black people. As of course in mainstream American cinema, virus = contagion = king kong = black people = avoid any contact with this species. Well we are not that far from this script IRL.

Another video shows an extract from Professor Raina MacIntyres paper presentation The fuss about face masks.9 She suggests the existence of biased practice guidelines concerning anti-contamination precaution as HCWs have been given facemasks, which have been proven inefficient considering the number of HCWs found dead. Lab workers, however, get to wear respira-tors, while the conditions of the clinical setting are far more risky than the lab. She draws a white man handing facemasks to black nurses to illustrate her point, emphasizing its racial implication. She criticizes the global coalition of inaction and the cultural imperialism that we are bombarded with everyday about this outbreak.

Driven by frustration and anger towards Americans idiocy and offensive measures towards African in America, Anthony England, a British chemist drew a map of Africa without Ebola that became viral two days ago after he posted it on his twitter account.

Ignorance & misinformation is a big problem with Ebola. So a clueless Kentucky school causing the resignation of a teacher because she spent



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10. MindPowerTrainingTelepathy,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-XRfM4mkCQ,accessed26October2014.

time in Kenya is just idiocy And that idiocy leads to fear which leads to people like Chris Christie implementing nonsensical anti-science quarantine restrictions. Ebola in the U.S. is becoming a farce.

(Taylor 2014)

Sekhukhuni might also be playing on this farce character with this work, but this time to criticize the global nonsense about Ebola. When getting to the end of the vertical scroll of Virus SS 16, under the photographs lays the video Mind Power Training Telepathy,10 a psychic meditative video, repeating The power of my mind is infinite, Universal power is mine, I can do anything. This video stands apart as it does not have a direct link with Ebola, yet it feels like the artist is trying to draw attention to the cosmological nature of mankind, resulting in spiritually to heal the worlds disaster. Yet, he might as well just be sarcastic.

Bogosi Sekhukhunis Virus SS 16 could be seen as a curated virtual exhibi-tion about Ebola. His choices of artworks are subtle, satirical yet incisive and give a personal critical picture of the frenzy online environment created by the Ebola outbreak. A hidden element of the work resides in the works URL description in Google, which is a link to an article from Ecouterre.com US offers 1 million prize for better anti Ebola contamination suits (Malik Chua 2014), which relates Nikes collaboration in crowdsourcing the new fabrics for Ebolas trend. Lol. Using the same online language as the media he is criticizing Bogosi Sekhukhunis work acts as an insightful comment on media propaganda.

Cuss Group is a South African digital art collective working mainly with video, installation and curation as an art practice drawing upon urban South African lifestyle and aesthetics together with the use of online visual language.

Figure 3: Screenshot of www.cussgroup.com/VP4 by Cuss Group.


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In 2013, the group started a series of intervention called Video Party, which uses video installation to promote cross-border collaboration and cultural exchange, emphasizing the hybrid production created by the urban environment in which the Video Party takes place. Embracing local and global dimensions, formal and informal settings, the space of exhibition and the artwork become one, which is where lies the artistic character of Cuss groups curation. They transform the selected artwork and merge it into an alien envi-ronment, revealing the urban environment as a powerful receptacle and cata-lyst for the piece creating a deeper and greater narrative. The three first-Video Party featured London-based artist Dan Szor, Hannah Perry and Racheal Crowther, and were respectively installed within a TV store, an Internet cafe and a hair salon in downtown Johannesburg, drawing attention to the citys urban dynamics and aesthetics and engaging with local audiences challenging the traditional gallery space.

When most of South Africas images sent to the rest of the world perpetu-ate a Manichean vision of either crime, racial divide and how dangerous it is to live in SA or the new trendy Urban hubs of Johannesburg and Cape town, not to mention Mandela, visual cultural resistance is necessary and appears as a social conscious gesture.

The online representation of South Africa is lacking subtleties and comprehensive information that goes beyond this divide. When taping Johannesburg on YouTube, the first pages videos are: The worlds strict-est parents (cause you know out there its the jungle), The documentary Staying Alive in Johannesburg This is Africa, The battle for Johannesburg, Carjacking in Johannesburg CBD, Johannesburg hit by massive sandstorm, The death of Johannesburg, Johannesburg extreme home security, Crime in South Africa Johannesburg CBD and in between this pejorative lexical field you find two documentaries about the new trendy lifestyle of bornfrees, Real scenes: Johannesburg, a short documentary about the house music scene and Travel Etiquette/South Africa - Johannesburg explor-ing SAs fashion . You also find Pharrel Williams Happy Johannesburg. This non-diversity of representation is problematic. Now that Johannesburgs hype is hanging out in the newly gentrified area of Maboneng (two streets filed with cafes, restaurants, art galleries and a number of security guards per street that makes the hipster community feel safe), Johannesburg is cool and trendy, a place worst to visit in the eyes of internationals to spend their foreign currency. It is easy to be cynical and critical about this area, which on an urban integration level did not do its homework, exacerbating class divide already too present in Johannesburg. Yet, it broadens the scope of dissemi-nated positive images of the country.

However, this is a sterilized, westernized view of the city; the works of Cuss is engaging in a new visual language for South Africa, which is critical, eclectic, trans-cultural challenging traditional representation of South Africa. Cuss embraces the raw aesthetics of downtown Johannesburg, which is still marginalized and rarely understood and not exploited as a rich source for artistic production. Cuss grips the urban reality of the city, confronting it to a global visual language that brought up by the Internet.

I am particularly interested in VP4 Video Party 4 as the dialogue around the Internet both in relation to the offline installation and the online work exceeds the use of the Internet as a simple dissemination platform. The work was to a greater extent about the Internet culture of appropriation addressing the copyright hacking practices common online.



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11. https://www.facebook.com//33980291952424 4/?ref=22, accessed 27 October 2014.

VP4 presents the work of British artist and musician Dean Blunt in Harare, Zimbabwe. The selected piece is the artwork/video clip fro Felony/Stalker 7. Cussgroup projected the work on a screen attached to the roof of a car in busy downtown Harare. The group did not ask for the right to use Dean Blunts video and just ripped it off YouTube. This gesture has to be understood as an open discussion around copyright infringement in the context of digital art practice. The fact that they chose the piece Felony from the artist addresses that very issue, the title of the song echoing the groups practice. On the Facebook event of the VP4s online release, Cuss described the work as such:

The presentation of the work draws on the aesthetics of Internet adver-tising and illegal downloading as a way to bring to the fore issues of re-appropriation around the vp4 project.11

Whether seen as a crime, a transgression, a cultural appropriation, a sign of admiration, or simply a mark of respect for his work and the desire to bring it to a different audience and context, VP4s installation was filmed in situ and then reedited with Dean Blunts video for the online release. This protocol blurs the lines between the offline event and the online piece as both become complementary, the real-life action serving as material for the online work.

Bringing together what seems at odds, VP4s installation can be read as a spam IRL, an undesirable appearance that obstructs the normal flow of movement, people stop and watch, other deviate and keep walking. The same phenomenon happens with VP4 onlines work, where the video appears in a pop up window, letting the viewer decide whether to watch it or to close it.

In the song Dean Blunt repeats Look what you did to me? I cannot help associate this phrase with a country yearning for its growth after being exploited and vandalized by colonialism. The sequels are still tangible, consid-ering both the present situation of Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Dean Blunt just released a pdf for his new album Black Metal where you can read:

You old black intellectuals are all the same, comfort is to blame. Truthfully some of you niggas need to get some sleep, your dreams arent manifesting correctly. Were not gonna be somebodys punching bag cos you wanna be relevant. So Watch Me Turn Up. So turnt up.

(Blunt 2014)

Cuss works, whether or not intended so, by the choice of its subject matter, its cultural discourse and dissemination strategies appear to me as social visual resistance merging #AfroCyberResistance and digital urban activism.

I have asked two members of Cuss, Ravi Govender (R) and Jamal Nxedlana (J) to share their thoughts about Digital Art Practices in South Africa. (Rezaire 2014b, 2014c)

- What is the relationship between CUSS and the Internet?

RCUSS Group has been able to live through its online platform without requir-ing the traditional gallery/cultural institute support structures as a means to survive and further more growth. I wouldnt say it was an impulse, more so a progression. There is a huge gap in the digital arts and culture sphere in SA.


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JCuss would not exist without the Internet so you can say we depend on it. More and more the Internet is becoming the exclusive platform on which we show our work.

- The utopia of the Internet? Internet neo-colonialism?

RWith regard to this statement, I cannot fully criticize it from all angles. I have noticed issues with regard to arts and culture in the digital realm which is almost relative to the way the art world has been divided on some levels. There is still a gap between western new contemporary digital arts practice and for instance African digital arts practice. Not only is the content different for various reasons but also the advancement of the aesthetic is far slower in Africas case as access and infrastructure are obvious influencing factors.

- Do you feel like occidental hegemony is also tangible online? Is the Internet an elitist medium considering the limited access in Africa?

JYeah definitely, the Internet or the spaces I navigate on the web are domi-nated by western content.

Its not as elite as say the gallery or museum systems in South Africa. But yeah it is elite when you consider the number of people that have access to the Internet. In cities there are spaces such as Internet cafes where people can access the net; I think its just a matter of people getting exposed to and educated about art on the Internet. Television and radio are the most acces-sible platform In SA, thats why we started doing the Websiodes, we hoped they would get on TV but they never did :(

- Do you feel that there is a South African aesthetics of Internet art? If so can it be seen as a form of social resistance?

RIt is definitely shaped to a global culture. There are a variety of fields and situations that might shape this internationally and locally. I do think people are also speaking about issues around them and utilizing popular local digital practices to do this in, so I think there is a South African aesthetic or a variety of them but it would be naive to believe it is 100 per cent its own. I am not completely sure that it can be seen as a resistance against western hegemony, but it is about utilizing global tools to speak locally.

JI dont think there is a South African aesthetic of Internet art because I think to few people are producing this type of work. I think its more of a global aesthetic. [Social resistance] Thats not really the aim but I do think it contrib-utes to a resistance of boxes, in a way the work contributed to an un-making of ideas about Africa or South Africa.

In conversation with Jamal Nxedlana, he told me that one of his intentions was to help to build the Internet as if still under construction. True indeed, especially for Africa where the Internet has not been yet invested and occupied



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12. Rangoato Hlasane was a guest of a panel discussion for the book launch of Creating Spaces: Non-formal Art/s Education at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg Library, on 22 October 2104.

fully. Yet, it is true also for the rest of the world, as we all need to contribute to a better, safer and fairer online environment. Like the initiative of Wikiafrica to Africanize Wikipedia, Cuss Group and Bogosi Sekhukhuni are trying to Africanize the global Internet art scene, which still remains mainly western. Challenging the visual aesthetic of the global Internet language with local content is of great importance, and whether receiving or producing content online, I believe the geographical position of this person sitting behind his or her computer matters as the cultural, social and political context influences what kind of information is made or consume.

The challenges of representation that the black body faced and is still facing in traditional media, like cinema, TV and newsprints are to be exam-ined on the online sphere as well. We need images of us told by us, bearing the subtleties and complexities inherent to the black body and history. Culture is an important facet of this struggle, and socially conscious practices chal-lenging the political status quo and stereotypical representation and discourse about Africa are necessary. The world needs to unlearn a lot of nonsense and relearn the history of humankind beyond exploitative structures and narratives. Africa needs to reconnect with the glory of its past, overcome its complex towards the white body, be proud and stand for itself. As Rangoato Hlasane, the co-founder of Keleketla! Library said,12 maybe art school should step back for a few years, for an experiment, maybe education should be free, for an experiment, and maybe international funding should step back for a few years, just for an experiment, so that we see what gets created on the African continent. There is still a long way to go to free our mind, our bodies and images; if the Internet is not the only tool, it is definitely a useful medium and platform to propagate knowledge, create discourse, raise critical aware-ness, and disseminate radical practices and actions aiming to challenge and resist our global mind screw.

RefeRenceSBlunt, D. (2014), Black metal, https://ia601404.us.archive.org/2/items/

BlackMetal/Black%20Metal.pdf. Accessed 3 November 2014.Bristow, T. (2011), Rephrasing protocol: Internet art in the global South,

presented at SAVAH Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, 1215 January 2011. Unpublished but referenced in WSOA 7007: Critical Debates in Digital Art and Culture. Course Reader: 2012, Produced by the Digital Arts Division of the University of the Witwatersrand.

Dominguez, R. (2002), Electronic disturbance, in S. Duncombe (ed.), Cultural Resistance Reader, New York: Verso, p. 393.

Dyangani Ose, E. (2012), The poetics of the Infra-Ordinary, in K. Kouoh (ed.), Condition Report Symposium on Building Art Institutions in Africa, Ostfilddern: Hatje Cantz, p. 117.

Effective measure (2014), South African mobile report, a survey of desktop users attitudes and uses of mobile phones, http://www.sabc.co.za/wps/wcm/connect/68746d0043a866399d42fda602140f6d/South_Africa_Mobile_ReportMar14.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CACHEID=68746d0043a866399d42fda602140f6d. Accessed 2 November 2014.

Malik Chua, J. (2014), U.S. Offers $1 Million Prize for Better Anti-Ebola Contamination Suit, Ecouterre, http://www.ecouterre.com/u-s-offers-1-million-prize-for-better-anti-ebola-contamination-suit/. Accessed 28 October 2014.


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McKenna, M. (2014), The further adventures of germ girl, http://germgirl.tumblr.com/. Accessed 29 October 2014.

Oforiatta- Ayim, N. (2012), New relativities of art, in K. Kouoh (ed.), Condition Report Symposium on Building Art Institutions in Africa, Ostfilddern: Hatje Cantz, p. 123.

Rezaire, T. (2014a), Re:#INTERNET #AFRICA #DIGITAL DIVIDE #DEVICE #GLOBAL MIND FUCK, e-mail to Bogosi Sekhukhuni ([email protected]), 31 October. Accessed 1 November 2014.

(2014b), Re: ^^^^^^^^^, e-mail to Ravi Govender ([email protected]), 24 October. Accessed 29 October 2014.

(2014c), Re: INTERNET, e-mail to Jamal Nxedlana ([email protected]), 22 October. Accessed 23 October 2014.

Sekhukhuni, B. (2014), Virus SS 16, http://newhive.com/bogosisekhukhuni/virus-ss-16. Accessed 26 October 2014.

Taylor, A. (2014), Map: The Africa without Ebola, The Washington Post, 3 November, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/ 2014/11/03/map-the-africa-without-ebola/. Accessed 4 November 2014.

SuggeSTed ciTaTionRezaire, T. (2014), Afro cyber resistance: South African Internet art, Technoetic

Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 12: 2+3, pp. 185196, doi: 10.1386/tear.12.2-3.185_1

conTRibuToR deTailSTabita Rezaire is a Danish-Guyanese artist-film-maker and video new media curator and researcher now based in Johannesburg. She holds a Master in Artist Moving Image from Central Saint Martins College, UK. Both her research and practice focus on the political aesthetics of resistance in and through video and new media practices. She engages in cinematic urban intervention and digital activism, producing videos, curating screenings and leading camera workshops in marginalized urban environments. Exploring the performativity of encounters, online and offline, she addresses issues of sex, race, gender and class confronting media stigmatization and occidental hegemony. Tabita is also a founder and curator of 35A collective.

E-mail: [email protected] address: www.tabitarezaire.com

Tabita Rezaire has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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