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8
Contents
editorial
KOFI AGAWU
African Art Music and the Challenge of Postcolonial Composition
PAUL ZILUNGISELE TEMBE
China’s Effective Anti-Corruption Campaign
DILIP M. MENON
Changing Theory: Thinking Concepts from the Global South
BEN WATSON
Talking about music
Theme AI in Africa
blk banaana
An (Other) Intelligence
VULANE MTHEMBU
Umshini Uyakhuluma (The Machine Speaks) – Africa and the AI Revolution: Exploring the Rapid Development of Artificial Intelligence on the Continent.
OLORI LOLADE SIYONBOLA
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence in Africa
CHRIS EMEZUE & IYANUOLUWA SHODE
AI and African Languages: Empowering Cultures and Communities
NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS
Toward Misrecognition. | Project notes for a haunting-ting
SLINDILE MTHEMBU
AI and documenting black women's lived experiences: Creating future awareness through AI-generated sonics and interpretive movement for the future of freeing suffering caused on black bodies.
ALEXANDRA STANG
Artificially Correct? How to combat bias and inequality in language use with AI
BAKARY DIARRASSOUBA
Bambara: The Jeli (Griot) Project
ROY BLUMENTHAL
Artificial Intelligence and the Arcane Art of the Prompt
AI GENERATED
"AI on Artificial Intelligence in Africa" and "Exploring its impact on Art and Creativity"
JULIA SCHNEIDER
AI in a biased world
MBANGISO MABASO
Bana Ba Dinaledi: Telling African Stories using Generative AI Art.
ALEX TSADO & BETTY WAIREGI
African AI today
BOBBY SHABANGU
Using Artificial Intelligence to expand coverage of African content on Wikipedia
DARRYL ACCONE
Welcome to The End of Beauty: AI Rips the Soul Out of Chess
VULANE MTHEMBU & ChatGPT
Hello ChatGPT - A conversation with OpenAI's Assistant
DIMITRI VOUDOURIS
Evolution of Sιήκ
STEFANIE KASTNER
Beyond the fact that most robots are white: Challenges of AI in Africa
MARTIJN PANTLIN
Some notes from herri’s full stack web developer on the AI phenomenon
galleri
THANDIWE MURIU
4 Universal Truths and selected Camo
ZENZI MDA
Four Portals
TIISETSO CLIFFORD MPHUTHI
Litema
NESA FRÖHLICH
Agapanthus artificialis: Biodiversität im digitalen Raum. Vierteilige Serie, Johannesburg 2022.
STEVEN J FOWLER
2 AI collaborations and 9 asemic scribbles
PATRICIA ANN REPAR
Integrating Healing Arts and Health Care
SHERRY MILNER
Fetus & Host
borborygmus
JANNIKE BERGH
BCUC = BANTU CONTINUA UHURU CONSCIOUSNESS
GWEN ANSELL
Jill Richards: Try, try, try...
VULANE MTHEMBU & HEIKKI SOINI
Nguni Machina remixed
AFRICAN NOISE FOUNDATION
Perennial fashion – noise (After Adorno).
RAJAT NEOGY
Do Magazines Culture?
NDUMISO MDAYI
Biko and the Hegelian dialectic
LEHLOHONOLO MAKHELE
The Big Other
frictions
KHAHLISO MATELA
At Virtue’s Zone
DIANA FERRUS
In memory of “Lily” who will never be nameless again
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Six Poems from the Shadows
SIHLE NTULI
3 Durban Poems
SIBONELO SOLWAZI KA NDLOVU
I’m Writing You A Letter You Will Never read
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships episode 3
claque
SIMON GIKANDI
Introducing Pelong Ya Ka (excerpt)
UNATHI SLASHA
"TO WALK IS TO SEE": Looking Inside the Heart - Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s Pelong ya Ka
VANGILE GANTSHO
Ilifa lothando – a Review of Ilifa by Athambile Masola
ZIZIPHO BAM
Barbara Boswell found in The Art of Waiting for Tales
WAMUWI MBAO
Hauntings: the public appearance of what is hidden
CHARL-PIERRE NAUDÉ
Dekonstruksie as gebundelde terrorisme
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili - A Review
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
Taking radical optimism beyond hope - Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South Africa’s Shack Settlements
PATRIC TARIQ MELLET
WHITE MISCHIEF – Our past (again) filtered through the lens of coloniality: Andrew Smith’s First People – The lost history of the Khoisan
CHANTAL WILLIE-PETERSEN
BHEKI MSELEKU: an infinite source of knowledge to draw from
JEAN MEIRING
SULKE VRIENDE IS SKAARS - a clarion call for the importance of the old and out-of-fashion
GEORGE KING
Kristian Blak String Quartets Neoquartet
ekaya
PAKAMA NCUME
A Conversation with Mantombi Matotiyana 9 April 2019
KYLE SHEPHERD
An Auto-Ethnographic Reflection on Process
PAULA FOURIE
Ghoema
DENIS-CONSTANT MARTIN
The Art of Cape Town Singing: Anwar Gambeno (1949-2022)
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
Something in Return, Act II: The Blavet-Varèse project
STEPHANUS MULLER
Afrikosmos: the keyboard as a Turing machine
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Ubizo and Mental Illness: A Personal Reflection
off the record
FRANK MEINTJIES
James Matthews: dissident writer
SABATA-MPHO MOKAE
Platfontein, a place the !Xun and Khwe call home
NEO LEKGOTLA LAGA RAMOUPI
A Culture of Black Consciousness on Robben Island, 1970 - 1980
NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES
Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality*
ARYAN KAGANOF
An interview with Don Laka: Monday 10 February 2003
JONATHAN EATO
Recording and Listening to Jazz and Improvised Music in South Africa
MARKO PHIRI
Bulawayo’s movement of Jah People
STEVEN BROWN
Anger and me
feedback
MUSA NGQUNGWANA
15 May 2020
ARYAN KAGANOF / PONE MASHIANGWAKO
Tuesday 21 July 2020, Monday 27 July, 2020
MARIA HELLSTRÖM REIMER
Monday 26 July 2021
SHANNON LANDERS
22 December 2022
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Facebook
the selektah
CHRIS ALBERTYN
Lost, unknown and forgotten: 24 classic South African 78rpm discs from 1951-1965.
hotlynx
shopping
contributors
the back page
CHRIS BRINK
Reflections on Transformation at Stellenbosch University
MARK WIGLEY
Discursive versus Immersive: The Museum is the Massage
© 2024
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #08
  • Theme AI in Africa

blk banaana

An (Other) Intelligence

Experiments for interconnected belonging in a computational present.

Questions//

How might we visualise the re-construction of the ‘fragmented self’, and by extension, the histories and trajectories produced by this state?

What is the role of imagination in the preservation of our memories?

In what ways might we  approach identity construction as a process of deep imagination and re-coding?

How do we affirm alternative modes of reimagining our histories and futures from the point of understanding them as intrinsically fragmented?

What effect do our data fragments – in the form of dreams, myths, memories, bodies, cells, spirits – have in the inevitability of artificial intelligence?

How are we being included? How are we being excluded?

How can AI be used as a tool for the preservation of our memories, and in the continued project of imaginative resilience?

1 of 4 Dall-E generated image using prompt “ 1800s style illustration of futuristic Malaysians fixing a family tree made of cables and microchips
data seeds for my family tree’ (2021). Digital collage

The present is a computerised dreamscape running on the power of bodies not found.

Not lost.

‘We’

The kidnapped, the convo-looted, the coded.
With curls packed tight with the liquid of our sea-fearing ancestors
Who turned and were turned to water.

And ‘We’

Who carried mirrors and memories ashore
Crossing and connecting the wires of the universe.

With each story remembered.
carried.
And re-told.

“‘We’, that is the colonised, have gradually and necessarily ‘acquired a taste for obscurity’. The need for the colonised to seek out ‘that which is not obvious’, to situate [our]selves within a discourse of complexity could be understood as the principle that animates each community’s ‘right to a shared obscurity’”.

Kodwo Eshun “Drexciya as Spectre”, Matter Fictions, Margarida Mendes Ed. Sternberg Press, 2017

How to treat our identities as a site of chaos? Or more specifically, to engage with the chaotic circumstances under which our ancestors ensured their own survival, thus ensuring ours?

she is always here, like water (2021) audio-video collage

The childlike imagination of nature is timelessly making multiple phases of itself.

While we watch and pretend to forget that we are part.

Our spirits and eyes transfixed by the white light distraction of webs being wound around us.

This permeable film of fragility.

Bondage made of shot nerves and tight blood veins.
Body and mind dismembered.
Our spirits dissected.
broken down into digestible cubes

Running from our boundless potential to remember who we are.

Wound tight by the binds and binaries of the million legged lusus naturae.

The freak of nature.

With fingers that curl around the heartstrings of our timelessness.
Striking false chords of disharmony.

On a rampage to reform and reprogramme our cells.
Designating and developing an artificial pattern of the source.

This devil of divine design.

Who makes mirrors look like portals to the unattainable.

Dividing and deleting what we’ve known since we were juice.
Joyfully splitting and joining.
And splitting and joining again.

III.

It’s not all the pus that leaves at once.

First it is the stench that slips through the resilient crack.

Then, festering bubbles protest through the careless sutures of this half healed scar.

Once a brutal gash.
Pulsating warm blood escaping profusely. Capillaries grasping for more. A life of sentence.

This burdened cellular construction.
Black and fertile.
Fighting the pain of a poison administered with the precision of a jagged porcelain arrow.

I know it is not my memory but it belongs to me intimately.
I wake up from this dream exhausted.
Stiffness builds up in my stomach.

A stiffness as strong as a fist with taut muscles holding back black spit curling out from my body.

“We don’t owe anyone coherence.”

– Julie Nxadi

An (Other) Intelligence

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