Donald Rodney: Digital Diaspora Presentation & Panel Discussion
Join us for an afternoon event exploring Donald Rodney’s interactive artwork Autoicon (2000) and the legacy of practices in digital and net art by Black and global majority artists in the 1990s.
A number of Rodney’s close friends and peers were at the forefront of developments in the early 1990s that opened up access to digital technologies for artists in the UK. In their collective and individual work, they raised vital questions around the relationship between a digital, data-based future and the experience of diaspora.
This event will address these converging histories and themes, beginning with an introduction and demonstration of Rodney’s Autoicon by curator and writer Richard Birkett. This will be followed by a discussion with Roshini Kempadoo, Keith Piper and Derek Richards, former members of the collective Digital Diaspora – an evolving association of UK based artists and writers of colour working with digital technology in the 1990s.
The event will end with a presentation and conversation with artist Ama Dogbe, whose practice has developed around the digital landscape and interactive media tools of recent years, exploring notions of selfhood, the archive and cultural symbolism.
More info on Autoicon:
Originally produced as both a website and CD-ROM, Donald Rodney’s Autoicon was conceived by the artist in the mid-1990s but not completed until 2000, two years after his death from sickle cell anaemia. Referencing Jeremy Bentham’s infamous nineteenth-century Auto-Icon, the work proposes an extension of the personhood and presence of Rodney, while challenging dominant conceptions of the self, the body and historical authenticity. Consisting of a Java-based AI and neural network, the platform engages the user in text-based ‘chat’ and provides responses by drawing from a dense body of data related to Rodney, including documentation of artworks, medical records, interviews, images, notes and videos.
Access
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This event will be held in the Space.
Speakers will use microphones.
This event is wheelchair accessible.
If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.
Richard Birkett is a curator and writer based in Glasgow, UK. He is the current Festival Director of Glasgow International, and was previously Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London from 2017-2020 and Curator at Artists Space in New York from 2010-2016. He is the author of the book Donald Rodney: Autoicon (Afterall Books, 2022).
Ama Dogbe is a British-Ghanaian artist whose work engages with a range of personal and societal themes through digital mediums including video games, digital animations and audio-visual installations. Her processes use self-taught and collaborative techniques to arrive at experimental and unconventional outcomes. Ama has been commissioned by Modern Painters, New Decorators, Loughborough (2024), Spike Island, Bristol (2023) and tiata fahodzi, Watford (2022), selected as digital artist in residence with Chisenhale Into The Wild, London (2023), and was a resident artist at BOM, Birmingham (2022). She has also exhibited with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art (2022), East Bristol Contemporary (2022) and Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester (2021).
Derek Richards is a producer, artist, educator and consultant a true polymath. As an artist Derek has exhibited installation work around the world. He has worked as a musician with the likes of Courtney Pine, Cleveland Watkiss, Tunde Jegede, Charles Hayward and Orphy Robinson among others; has scored for film, TV and radio, and has composed music for and directed theatre.
As a creative technologist and video & projection designer he has collaborated on productions with Rambert, the Royal Court, Nitro, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Barbican, South Bank Centre, Contact Theatre, Statstheater Mainz, the National Theatre and The Albany among others. He has also directed productions with Black led theatre company Nitro and at the Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House.
In the 90s Derek co-founded Artec, the UK’s first media lab and centre for learning digital media production. He pioneered teleconferencing for trans-Atlantic live collaborative performance, firstly with Digital Diaspora on the Digital Slam (1995) and later with his own company HyperJAM (1997 – 2006). Derek has since won 11 awards for his digital and interactive media work including installations for London’s Science Museum and for gallery exhibition as well as online work.
HyperJAM led the way in applications of interactive digital media and communications to live events – connecting venues and audiences around the world for real time collaborative performances and producing interactive projections and soundscapes for theatre, music, dance and for corporate events.
Between 2009 and 2014 Derek ran the BAFTA award winning film & media training and production company Hi8us South. Today, while practicing as an artist working at the leading edge of digital technologies, Derek is Head of Broadcast & Digital at London's Roundhouse and lectures in Digital Design and Production at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Keith Piper is a Black British artist, curator, researcher and academic. His creative practice responds to specific issues, historical relationships and geographical sites. He has exhibited work nationally and internationally. In the early 1980s, Piper was a founder member of the BLK Art Group - an association of young artists of African Caribbean descent, based in the West Midlands. During this period, he established a research driven approach to art practice, prioritising thematic exploration over an attachment to any particular media. His work has ranged from painting, through photography and installation to a use of digital media, video and computer-based interactivity. Piper currently teaches Fine Art at Middlesex University, London.