////African Robots////Cher Potter & Ralph Borland

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This AlterFutures will focus on African design futures and is held in conjunction with South African artist and researcher Ralph Borland’s exhibition African Robots.

Joining Ralph will be Cher Potter, V&A Senior Research Fellow, who will present her new 2-year project on design futures in Sub-Saharan Africa, which starts next month and runs until 2017. This project brings together design theorists, technological innovators and museum professionals from six different centres - Dakar, Accra, Nairobi, Cape Town, London and Oxford - for a series of talks and exhibitions taking place in Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and London. The aim is to investigate how a ‘digital revolution’ combined with unprecedented city and population growth on the African continent is resulting in new typologies of design.

African Robots is a project to create interactive electronic street art. ‘Street art’ in this instance means art sold by people on the street, in South Africa and Zimbabwe – usually forms of handicraft using inexpensive materials like fencing and electrical wire, beads and waste wood, plastic and metal. The project focuses particularly on wire work, where artists make three dimensional forms from wire, using a cheap material to create complex results. Basic electronic components can with the necessary know-how also be used as cheap material for creating interactive sculptures.

African Robots (http://ralphborland.net/africanrobots/)

is a project that functions at many levels: as a social development project, sharing skills with street artists; as an art project, leading to new works; as a critical design study that imagines alternative futures through fictional artefacts; and as an exercise in friendship and skill-sharing to catalyse innovation. The project will be on exhibition at MachinesRoom (http://machinesroom.org/), a British Council Maker Library space in London, from 13 August - 3 September 2015.