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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
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #08
  • Theme AI in Africa

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.

Igama lami ngingu (my name is) Slindile Mthembu. I am Black. I am a woman. I am a playwright, a director of theatre, creative producer, and a theatre-maker. At the intersections of gender, race, class, and artistic profession, I exist within a historically male-dominated industry, as well as experience multiple levels of oppressive structures that have excluded and muted the voices of many of those who look like me, resulting in unequal opportunities. It is, for this reason, I do what I do. To be part of Black women who have worked hard to have their voices heard so that these voices are part of history. 

Igama state theatre 2019

As a result..in my enrolment as a MA student in the theatre and performance department, I was required to script a new contemporary South African experimental play IGAMA? (2020) narrates the story of five women who live in a well-behaved South African community. The aim is to see if the women can break out of the stereotype or whether they conform to the boxed post-colonial South African Society. The work has been an ongoing investigation on the collective memory, trauma and identity that the black body carries and what it means for the black body to release/open up about the intersectional memories of violation—as a response to retrieving the articulation of embodied memories through the representation of the complex, racialized, sexualized dissection of the black moving body. This investigation gazes at ways in which the black body negotiates through interpretive movement how to get rid of the memories and the unwanted identity that women live with every day. 

This investigation seeks to investigate the past, present and possible futures for black womanhood and the ways black (women’s)bodies as sites, as land, loaded with memory, prepare for these futures. This idea is to now see how a body loaded with memory survives and tells its histories; how the body as site—with embodied memory, is complicated and transposed sonically; where we challenge the non-linear form of storytelling as has been my ongoing praxis, and its importance to understanding the complex lived experience of black womanhood living in a post-colonial society.

stills by Nonzuzo Gxekwa

My argument is that the linear structure or one-dimensional narratives depicting black women and their intersectional lives serves no value in categorizing the complex experiences of black women living in South Africa and is a far too limiting structure because thinking and existing for the black female being is multi-layered: in thinking about race you also speak about gender, which means you also speak about economics and access, which also means you speak about the platform and reach, etc. I argue that the intersectional lived experiences of Black womanhood cannot function within a rigid (beginning, middle, and end) playwriting structure, because this limiting form forces the black woman to be depicted through a one-dimensional experience when black women’s experiences are multi-layered, nuanced, complicated, and should be structured within a six-dimensional experience that reflects the Black women’s identity as a form of resistance to refuse remaining muted, othered, and oppressed. 

This investigation through the digital arts space, will therefore argue why black women’s multidimensional reality cannot be viewed through a single, rigid, and fixed linear narrative. The multiple dimensions through technology—using projections, will be used to evaluate black women’s interconnecting oppression visually. Through this essay, I am looking to further explore how the tension that is carried through the feminine body passes through the arch of simultaneity, which can be better categorized as the six mountains that Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (1994:9-25) characterizes as the black women’s interconnecting experience, with oppressive metaphoric structures of six mountains placed on a black woman’s back; tradition, Backwardness to do with colonization, race, patriarchy, the global order and lastly and most importantly, herself. Ironically with all the hardship that we as black women endure, we can move with the six mountains on our backs. The black women’s experience, intersecting inside theatre spaces, is enabling women to know that they are not alone. As black women, we need to fight against the injustices caused by the interconnecting oppression we experience. Even if the mountains are heavy and leave a mark, these marks are left as a symbolism to free our foremothers from issues they couldn’t historically stand against.

The aim of this essay is to further investigate how to use AI techniques to document/record the past, present and possible futures for black women living in South Africa and how our bodies as sites, as land, loaded with memory, prepare for these futures. As an attempt to create awareness of the multiple oppressions caused by rape, victimization, prejudice, women abuse, sexual violence, race, and patriarchal constraints.

Remembering stills by Thusi Vukani 2
Remembering stills by Thusi Vukani
Remebering stills by Thusi Vukani 3

Therefore, I am fascinated by the relationship of memory, and how AI can document the collective memories of trauma that women have experienced on all three different levels i.e gender, race, and class. The idea is to record myself and use the filmed version of IGAMA?  who give consent to speak about their lived experiences as a case study to further create awareness of black womxns lived experiences in a post-colonial South Africa. Speak through the issues regarding gender-based violence. Using the work as a visual case study to create awareness. 

In the recordings, I am attempting to use AI sonic interpretation and deep motion tracking to enhance the collective memory of black womanhood as a reaction against structuralism on stage, as a rebellious act that argues why the complexities of the black womxn’s lived experience onstage cannot be confined into a rigid/linear structure.

Editor’s notes: Further investigations and explorations

What Could an Artificial Intelligence Theater Be? 

Human-AI Collaboration in Performing Arts

AI As A Tool In The Arts

Audio on this page by Thembinkosi Mavimbela, OpenAI’s MuseNet, Google’s Magenta.

Motion capture and body tracking by Deepmotion AI

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ALEXANDRA STANG
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute