What Else Can Technology Be?

Uzoma Orji: First of all, where’s your head at, at this point in your residency at Schloss Solitude?

Kombo Chapfika: Well, there are two things. First, my priority is the Venice Biennale where I will show works at the Zimbabwean pavilion. I found out about my participation when I got here. I’m looking to dive further into production. And then just trying to balance my own mental health but also being available to be helpful in whatever way I can because some of the people here are really struggling with everything going on in the world. Yeah. I’m also trying to reconnect with some people back home because I’ve been here a while, and it takes work to keep those relationships going. It’s about focusing on production but staying a member of this community.

UO: Before we go deeper into the discussion, I wanted to find out if there’s anything you want to talk about. Maybe something you’re looking forward to getting out of this conversation. Or are you just happy to ride the wave?

KC: There’s an idea that’s hard for me to articulate but I can try … it’s like this conflict where I’m asking myself, »Has technology so far developed in such a capitalistic Western way that trying to morph it into something else is going to be difficult, because it’s already started this way?« If that’s the case, which my intuition is telling me it is, then it’s too important in our lives for us to just ignore it. We can’t just leave it this way. It’s almost like math at this point. Though math is more universal than these things, it’s the foundation.

»Has technology so far developed in such a capitalistic Western way that trying to morph it into something else is going to be difficult, because it’s already started this way?«

UO: Is math more universal than tech? Can you say more about that?

KC: Math is more universal than technology because counting is a very fundamental thing, on the most basic level. Even some animals have shown that they can count. Although I have to say there have been different counting systems, like, for example, Ifa divination system. But thinking of digital technology, which is based on math and equations, and all that stuff, I mean, you don’t have to engage with technology at all. No email, no nothing, and you can still be functional – take for example our fellow fellow Deepika Arwind’s dad: He understands math perfectly but doesn’t engage with digital technology. A lot of the technologies that we’re now using are only necessary because we’ve grown up with them. But you can still live quite successfully in this world without some of these things. In my case, I couldn’t, because I’ve built my whole knowledge base around these technologies.

UO: Yeah, same.

 

KC: It’s related to this idea of how much do we get to steer it? With these sudden major changes, like in AI and machine learning, it feels more like being taken by the tide, rather than getting to make a conscious choice like I was making before. I chose to learn After Effects, for example, a visual effects software. But now, the big tech marketplace wants to move towards AI because it favors capital, it’s less reliant on artists. They just use the artwork as training data, and then make the platforms necessary. So, I feel like we’re kind of being pulled along. I’ll send you a link to a studies by Google scholar Janiya R. Peters. It’s the first phase of a study on creative people’s opinions about AI. Some of the questions were good, like in terms of, »How much do you use AI?« »Do you feel like you’re choosing to use it, or like you have to?« Overall, I think big money is leading the creatives. AI is where we’re going. And that whole push toward novelty is what I’m most worried about. It’s an appetite for anything brand new and a devaluation of things that are traditional. It seems you can’t just be amazing at Photoshop and that’s enough. I mean you can, but the people with money want to fund the latest thing, because that’s where they make more money. It’s new, rather than things we’ve learned to pirate so much already.

UO: Yeah. When you said big money’s leading creativity, I thought big money is leading the world.

KC: Yeah, yeah, you’re right.

UO: You know, looking at your question »Has technology been so far developed in a capitalistic Western way that trying to morph it into something else is impossible?« it seems to me like a question of world views, values, and systems. The things that cause technology are the result of innovation and innovation responding to necessity, but who’s defining what is necessary? We need a redefinition of what is necessary. How can we change our understanding of what is necessary, and what we want technology to morph into?

KC: Sometimes we feel like we don’t have that agency. We see how big these platforms are and we’re like there’s no way we can make something that can compete with them. But we need to just kind of ignore that scale and actually start super small, and remember the origin stories of some of these big things like Facebook. It started off with people in college with a LAN (Local Area Network), you know. If we can start small, we can make things that actually serve our values and what we actually want these platforms to do. The most innovation happens with college-age people who are not being served by the status quo. They try something new. They’re synthesizing recent information. I think starting small and with the youth is the way to go.

»If we can start small, we can make things that actually serve our values and what we actually want these platforms to do.«

And we need to articulate what the errors are, what we don’t like about the status quo, like the way so much data is centralized, the way it’s being used for surveillance. If we start from knowing that these are things we don’t want, we can create systems that don’t have those issues. When blockchain first came out, maybe I was misunderstanding it, but now, oh my goodness, we could get decentralized systems where your data is secure. I am also thinking of decentralized social media and news platforms like Mastodon.

UO: Mastodon, yeah.

KC: … it might be the closest version to that. That’s more the direction I hope things will start to go. I’ve been hacked and don’t think it was a hacker. I believe it was unscrupulous censorship because the coincidence of when it happened was just too much. I’d been posting some commentary from a distance about Justin Trudeau as they were shutting down the trucker anti-vaccine rallies in Canada then. And then literally the next day, Facebook hacked my account. I never again want a situation where that can happen. Maybe I should have moved on to Mastodon but that’s the trick now. It’s such a big jump. I understand why people want to address these big issues and be visible. But there is value in trying to keep things personal. Even I do sometimes. Yeah. I just wish we could articulate that it’s not bad when people don’t show. In fact, it could be a good thing for some people to understand this.

UO: Yeah, it seems like this is one of the many negative consequences of this homogenous, global techno culture, which is like we’re all on the same platforms, and we’re all seeing the same things and we’re all having the same responses. And there is a subtle push toward sameness.

KC: Yes

UO: This thing about decentralization is a question that I’m thinking about a lot in my own work and life: What would an internet created by our ancestors look like? It relates to that question that you asked at the start of this conversation. When we talked about this in our studio visit, your response to that was, it would be a network of smaller nodes and not these big monoliths.

KC: It has to be!

UO: Yeah. So this thing about decentralization is very interesting.

KC: The way I tried to think about decentralization was to reimagine the context. If you’re living in a more rural communal situation where people know each other, you might want smaller nodes. Today’s networks rely on technology and the heavy emphasis on entertainment (streaming platforms, scrolling, accumulation). It all used to become a form of entertainment and spectacle. There’s a good book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in 1985. Everyone always loves entertainment, but I think that in ancestral times they put more value on cultural rituals that would encourage a sense of community, connection with your past, rather than this hyper-individualistic consumption of accumulative sensation. Even the sensation of outrage is now being consumed, and it’s also addictive.

UO: Super addictive. Why do you think so? What purpose does the sensationalization of everything and everything being entertaining serve?

KC: It goes back to the capitalist profit motive. Today, If you want people to pay attention to a topic, you have to present it in a way that it competes with TikToks and all that stuff.

UO: Yes, this conversation is making me think about the use of numbers on social media, like even going back to what we’re saying about math – that numbers are so central to how we perceive the world today. With the platforms we’re on, we see that this video has X number of views and this person has X number of followers and this TikTok has X number of likes, and you’re always confronted with this scale of so-called reach or impact. That does something. Thinking about it now, that’s very intentional.

KC: Oh, yeah.

UO: So going back to this villagization of the internet, like scaling everything down, decentralization also would involve decentering numbers on these platforms.

KC: Yes, and a lot of these numbers miss the point. Let’s say Kim Kardashian posts something and it’s racy or shocking or whatever. There will be millions of likes. But the average Instagram post or story is viewed for less than 30 seconds – I think it’s something like in the tenths of seconds. Numbers might in themselves be a problem in terms of scorekeeping but the better number for actual value would be time of engagement. Can it help us to slow down and think more deeply about whatever ideas are being presented there? Sometimes we actually hunger for value and content over clicks and entertainment, and we can feel it. I’m on Instagram for two hours a day, and my thoughts are fragmented, I’m all over the place. I’m consuming too many images to even pursue my own stuff, because I’m scattered. So, for me, there is something calming about the idea of staying with one idea for two hours straight.

 

Kombo Chapfika is a Zimbabwean multidisciplinary artist who studied in Atlanta/US, obtaining a BA in Economics. Chapfika’s work explores the mutation of contemporary African culture as it adapts to modernity and technological interconnectedness. Curiosity, experimentation, and social commentary are essential to his creative process, which is based on an interest in the interplay of technology and culture and how the tools we use reshape us.

Chidumaga Uzoma Orji is a visual/digital/web artist and creative/spiritual technologist. His work is concerned with unpacking postcolonial crises of identity, fueling imagination in service of progressive African futures, and exploring ancestral spirituality through a contemporary lens. He lives and works in the serene hills of Abuja/Nigeria.