Beacon: Shine a Light
When we have editorial meetings at Immerse and discuss the people we would like to invite to write or feature in some way, we always end up with long lists of really extraordinary people, organizations and collectives. I thought it would be a nice idea to start a regular feature where we shine a light on some of the people and groups that inspire us, partly as a path of discovery for ourselves because as always we welcome suggestions, particularly from parts of the world we might not be knowledgeable about. Let us know who inspires you in emerging media/digital arts/whatever you call the space you are in.
So without further ado, here are this month’s five we like:
Jepchumba
Kenyan-based Jepchumba is a powerhouse curator and speaker and the woman behind the wonderful website African Digital Art, an incredibly rich celebration of art, design, and technology in Africa. If you are looking to find out who is making exciting work in Africa, start here and be sure to follow African Digital Art on Instagram too for a regular dose of inspiration.
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
Gray Area just completed its fourth annual festival showcasing groundbreaking art and technology. Based in San Francisco and founded by Josette Melchor, Gray Area runs an incubator, a series of classes, and exciting events that are truly interdisciplinary and focused on community and positive social impact.
Monika Bielskyte
A nomadic futurist, Monika Bielskyte prototypes culturally diverse, socially and environmentally engaged future world designs. She is a co-founder of ALLFUTUREEVERYTHING, an agency & a platform for prototyping futures. She travels constantly, often in the Global South, so she’s truly global in her outlook and future imaginations, always with a humanitarian focus and avoiding both nostalgia and techno-fetishism. Bielskyte is trying to help us avoid living the dystopian nightmares of so much sci-fi pop culture. And, as she reminds us, the future is now. What we do now, and what we look away from, shape the future.
Hyphen-Labs
Hyphen-Labs is an international team of women of color working at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future, working collaboratively across the globe: “[W]e all wore a bunch of different hats. We gave each other feedback on the pieces that we each sort of owned, but there was a lot of cross-pollination of ideas and skillsets. We all had to learn stuff that we didn’t know how to do, very quickly.” Research is a big part of the group’s methodology, as this interview makes clear. Hyphen-Labs is behind the award-winning NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, which premiered at Sundance and was recently released on the Oculus Store.
Centre for the Less Good Idea
An interdisciplinary incubator for the arts founded by artist William Kentridge and based in Johannesburg, South Africa. The center creates a space for ideas at the edge of things and embraces failure in all the right ways: “It is a safe space for failure, for projects to be tried and discarded because they do not work. It’s a space for short form work which doesn’t have a natural home in a theatre or gallery.” On a related note, watch Kentridge’s talk from Design Indaba on peripheral thinking.
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