This is a web page hosting material for our Dubship I – Expanded Universe installation at the Dakar Biennale 2022. Come find us in Salle B at the Ancien Palais de Justice! The exhibition opens 5pm Thursday 19 May and runs till 21 June 2022.
We have an Augmented Reality (AR) experience running in the space, only for iPhone and iPad so far (we’ll be making an Android version soon) available here on the Mac App Store: Dubship AR
After you’ve downloaded the app, open it, and then point your phone’s camera (you see through it in the AR app) at this trigger image shown below, it’s the middle lightbox under the giant star graphic on the far wall, showing the dub album cover ‘Badda Dan Dem’. Then turn around and you’ll see an animated 3D model of the Dubship sculpture, as used in our virtual reality world Digi-Dub Club, superimposed on the space!
You should see something like this screenshot, below. The AR experience brings the Dubship to Dakar in virtual form, extending the overall project’s theme of ‘Transportations Through Technology’ – which is also the title of the large star-shaped graphic artwork up on the wall, a collaboration with comic book artist Loyiso Mkize.
Here follows the text describing the installation:
Dubship I – Expanded Universe, the title of this installation, is a project by African Robots and SPACECRAFT, a collaboration with street wire artists that started in 2013 with the creation of a small robot bird in Cape Town, South Africa. Both projects explore the combination of handcraft with digital processes, and science fiction and pop cultural material with vernacular forms of making.
Dubship I – Black Starliner is a large-scale music-making spaceship sculpture, exhibited at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in 2019. It draws on material around the Pan-African political activist Marcus Garvey and his Black Star Line shipping company, through its memorialisation in dub music, a musical form that is a shared interest between the artists working on the project.
During global Covid lockdown restrictions, the Dubship project moved into Virtual Reality, in the project Digi-Dub Club, a shared online social space around an animated 3D model of the sculpture, produced by scanning the physical piece. This work extends dub music’s creation of virtual sonic spaces through echo and delay effects on giant sound system in Jamaica, into the metaverse.
A theme of the expanded project, expressed in our new giant graphic artwork of the same title,with accompanying Augmented Reality experience, is ‘Transportations Through Technology’. This theme follows a thread through Garvey’s repurposing of the ocean liner from a tool of colonial extraction to a means of return for the descendants of African slaves, through dub music’s sonic transportations to an imagined Africa, to space travel as a metaphor for escape from oppression and towards transcendence, into today’s technology of the metaverse.
We relate our work too to the Biennale’s theme of I NDAFFA # – to forge, from the Dubship sculpture, fabricated through bending and shaping metal rods by hand and welding them together through heat and light, to the bending to new purposes of material by creative activists like Garvey, to dub music as forged in the crucible of the Black Atlantic. While playing with new forms the project, like the Sankofa bird, recovers past histories, and presents fresh spaces for spectacle and collaboration.
Dubship I – Expanded Universe, runs from 2019 – 2022, the centenary period of the Black Star Line.
Thank you to the National Arts Council of South Africa for funding the sculpture Dubship I – Black Starliner, and African Culture Fund for their grant to develop Digi-Dub Club. African Robots and SPACECRAFT has been funded by British Council and Pro Helvetia.
Works
Graphic
Transportations Through Technology, 2022 with Loyiso Mkize
Lightboxes
The Yarmouth, first ship in the Black Star Line, 1919
Badda Dan Dem by Lone Ranger, album cover, 1982
Jimmy’s bakkie, photo by Ralph Borland, Cape Town 2020
Videos
The Making of Dubship I – Black Starliner, 2019
Digi-Dub Club walk through, 2020
Drone Circle, 2022
Sculpture
Dubship Mini, 2019 with Lewis Kaluzi
Dakar Soleil Etoile, 2022 with Moustapha Ndiaye, Mamadou Diatta and Moussa Thiandoum (courtesy of the Dakar Biennale).
Photographs
Dubliggaam I and II with Tommaso Fiscaletti and Nic Grobler, 2019
Augmented Reality
AR in Dakar, 2022 with Sean Devonport
Credits
Dara Kell for her assistance and editing. Jason Stapleton for VR and 3D modelling. Wellington Moyo for metalwork. Lewis Kaluzi, Farai Kanyemba and Franco Shidume for wire art. Marc Nicolson and Boyd and Ogier for fabrication. Tristan Nebe for electronics. Brendon Bussy for composition. Nick Birkby for sound systems. Gavin Coppenhall for instruments. Sean Devonport for VR and AR.
Ralph Borland researches the impact of emerging technologies in Africa for HUMA, a Pan-African research institute at the University of Cape Town.