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I am a South African artist, designer and technologist now based in Dublin, Ireland, where I am pursuing my PhD with a cross-disciplinary research group within the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department at Trinity College.
You may read a January 2006 biography on the South African art website ArtThrob.
Read more about my work below.
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Current projects
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PSi16 - I made a short video presentation titled 'The PlayPump: Mechanics of a Static Technology' as my contribution to a panel presentation at PSi16 Performing Publics in Toronto, 12 June 2010. The panel was titled 'Network Fetishisms: Beyoncé, Bicycle Couriers, Digital Divinity, and Development Design'. My presentation frames some of the work in my PhD thesis, focusing on my main case-study, the PlayPump.
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Mesh - For my contribution to the South African group exhibition JAMcity, I produced two large-scale maps of Wifi networks in Cape Town and Johannesburg. All that is shown is the name of each wireless network, in small type, at the correct positions relative to each other and the geography of each city. The project also includes online resources.
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DDT - In October 2006 I started my PhD with a research group called the Disruptive Design Team (DDT) at Trinity College, Dublin. The title of my doctorate is 'Radical Plumbers and Playpumps: Objects in development'. My work with the group combines art, design and activist practise. (This is very much a preliminary framing of my research; I will be submitting my thesis later this year, and will provide a more thorough, updated account). |
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Pattern - A project to map the appearance of a distinctive, cellular automata-like tiling pattern that occurs around the world. I am inviting people around the world to take photographs of the pattern wherever they see it, and to send the images to me for the construction of an artwork.
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Clinton St. - 'Clinton St' is a project to memorialise and direct public attention to an event that took place in my old neighbourhood in New York City in January 1998. Next January will the 10th anniversary of the destruction of a building at the corner of Clinton and Stanton Street - an apartment block that was torn down by the City in front of its residents, taking their belongings and pets with it. This project has been accepted to the exhibition Conflux, on in New York in September.
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smSage - A collaborative project, with Tim Redfern, to plant a murmur in the city, a mad whisper. A security-camera body houses a device for receiving text messages and speaking them out, rearranging words as it does so. This project will also be on at Conflux.
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Community garden - I'm involved in a community gardening project in my neighbourhood of Rialto, in Dublin. We're an informal collective growing vegetables and creating a garden on a plot of disused land. This is a link through to the blog for the garden.
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Past projects
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Song of Solomon - An 8-channel audio installation created in September 2006 in collaboration with Julian Jonker. A computer program samples many versions of the song ‘Mbube’ (the source of the song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’) to form a continually-changing audio collage that questions notions of intellectual property and the processes of cultural production.
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Promised land - An exhibition of work that
comments on contemporary South Africa through manipulated found-objects and fictional
artefacts, first shown at blank projects in Cape Town in August 2006. |
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Sideshow - In March 2006 I was part of the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne,
Australia, itself part of the Cultural Program of the Commonwealth Games 2006. I produced the work Sideshow, an exhibition and social space featuring political art and documents, and provocative technology from around the world. |
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Suited for Subversion - A protective suit which projects the wearer's heart-beat outside of their body. The suit draws on the protective-wear worn by activists at large-scale street demonstrations in Europe and the United States. The project was part of the show SAFE - Design takes on Risk, at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2006. |
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Jetty Square - The public space I worked on with Earthworks Landscape Architects, for which I made a group of 'ghost shark' sculptures, reexploring where the sea once lay. |
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Front - A collaborative art project with my friends Margot Jacobs and Jessica Findley, as The Millefiore Effect. Front is a pair of sound-activated, inflatable ceremonial conflict-suits - on exhibition, we act as attendants and help visitors to posture and play in the suits. This project has been exhibited all over the world since we first developed it in 2000.
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Other links:
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Tim Redfern - Tim is an artist working in new media in Dublin, Ireland. He has a particular focus on generative graphics systems for performance and installation. He is presently pursuing a Phd in the Distributed Systems Group at Trinity College's Computer Science Department, and is an active force in the digital arts scene in Ireland.
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Pieter Hugo - Pieter Hugo is a South African photographer who exhibits all over the world, and whose work can be found in Adbusters, Colors, Dazed & Confused, The New Yorker and the Sunday Times (London), amongst other publications. He recently won the Standard Bank Young Artist's Award for 2007. |
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Nathaniel Stern - Nathaniel is a fellow graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, and an internationally exhibited (and awarded) artist, teacher and technologist, born in New York. After several years in Johannesburg, South Africa, he is now a PhD student and member of the Disruptive Design Team at Trinity College, Dublin. |
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My CV perhaps? Download a PDF
You can contact me at the address below. It isn't text or a link (to deter the spambots - fat chance), please copy it by hand.
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Ralph Borland, 1 July 2010
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