What is Ubuntu
What is Ubuntu is a Search Engine Art Project created for Wikimania 2018 by Gretchen Andrew with support from Whose Knowledge & Cape Town's A4 Art's Foundation.
This page provides information on the project and related events & discussions happening in Cape Town July 17 - 22nd
Gretchen Andrew, Roughly Translated As A4 Arts Foundation welcomes search engine artist Gretchen Andrew to share the ongoing process and outcomes of two projects made for Wikipedia's annual conference. Gretchen Andrew is interested in where language fails as a poetic part of painting’s the Raison D’être. Technology has a particularly hard time with nuance, relativity, and the gaps in language. The result is it often compresses human complexity into a caricature of itself that also ends up sexist, racist, and deeply intolerant of difference.
Gretchen starts Search Engine Art pieces by making paintings about a personal theme that she then defines in terms of what the internet refers to as “keywords.” In this case, "Made for Women" and “What is ubuntu.” Once the paintings are completed in the studio, she programs their images in a way that manipulates and dominates the search results of the theme/keyword, a process she calls Internet Imperialism.
Made For Women is a marketing term that implies solutions to previously unknown problems related to female identity. Nuanced conversations, on and offline, are getting harder to come by. Maybe in part because of how technology is, fundamentally binary. How we have conversations about visual gender identity impacts our relationships with others and ourselves.
What Is Ubuntu is search engine art is a piece created for Wikipedia’s annual conference which looks at the internet’s current impact on non-English languages, art as knowledge form, and the internet's preference for products over people.
Artist workshop & tours occurring at A4 Arts Foundation
23 Buitenkant Street, Cape Town, District Six, 8000
- July 19 Thursday 4:30 - 5pm
- July 21 Saturday 10:15 - 10:45am
Wikimania Meet Up - Art as a Knowledge Form, Friday 8:00 - 9:00am (London room)
Lighting Talk - Art for Intelligent Machines, Saturday 12:00 - 13:00 (Esino Lario room)
