I caught up with digital artist, researcher and curator Carly Whitaker about her latest work and the digital art space in South Africa.
“My work often amounts to expressing who I am and using the medium to maximize that expression,” Carly expressed. Her work explores on how we behave online, our relationship to the online as well as how our relationships with one another manifest online.
Carly views her research and writing as a way to critically interrogate digital mediums. “I am extremely invested in finding out what it means to other practitioners to use the medium and how it assists them, especially in South Africa where it is an emerging medium and emerging field.”. Her work is influenced by the internet as a whole, particularly how content manifests online. She expressed how she is constantly overwhelmed and falling in love with the internet. The content of her work is largely influenced by music. “I find that a lot of the way in which we behave in relationships and behave online comes through in song lyrics,” Carly explained. Her creative process usually starts off with her creating a gif. Thereafter she translates that into a gif box or a physical manifestation of a gif.
Her latest installation, titled All the feels for you, is a collection of work was part of a group exhibition that took place at No End Contemporary Art Space. Extending from her fascination with the online and the specific kinds of communication that it engenders, these works look at the feelings you get when you first meet someone, and you quite literally have all the feels for them. Carly explores how within that initial spark there is a constant negotiation between partners, and how online platforms are embedded within that negotiation. The specific work You text nothing like you look references Frank Oceans song ‘Good Guy’. This gif is about figuring out how someone else speaks and how they function online, specifically through messaging. What can be challenging is figuring out how to translate these digital artifacts into physical spaces. Carly has been trying to work through this, describing All the feels for you as being the closest she has gotten to re-creating in a physical space how we interact with our computer screens. Carly gave the curators at No End instructions on how to install her works in such way that they collectively reflected the way one behaves within one’s computer screen with multiple tabs open. “So they are individual works in their own right but collectively they become the sum of their parts,” Carly explained. She is thinking about taking this work further to challenge herself in terms of display.
On the 26th of January Carly will be part of another group exhibition at No End titled What’s in it for you?. The two works she will be showing, Algorithmic Kinda Love and I am a unicorn, are both gifs and are simple explorations of concepts that she is developing in more complex ways in other works. Algorithmic Kinda Love is a response to her earlier work EMOJIKINDALOVE which looked at how we use emojis to express affections. This latest work looks at how we try to find love through algorithms in online spaces such as Tinder and other dating sites. I am a unicorn relates to this work conceptually in that it explores how people try to find the perfect partner. “So we are all searching for unicorns and we all think we are unicorns,” Carly explained.
Investing in all aspects of the digital art practice, Carly also runs an online residency program called Floating Reverie. She invites various artists once a month to be part of this two week long program. “The idea is that they work on their research and their process and their concept every day. And each day repetitively somehow doing something or building on a concept that they have done,” Carly explained. She is also planning to start an online gallery called Blue Ocean.
Carly notes that there are few practitioners that are looking at the medium at the moment. However, she is excited about the growth the digital art space has seen and will see in the future. For her, seeing big galleries such as Stevenson and Goodman getting behind artist who are using the medium is evidence of the growing recognition and support both for artists and the medium. Keeping up to date with the work of current graduates and seeing the way that people use apps such as Instagram and Snapchat as a creative outlet is encouraging for her and the future of digital arts in South Africa.
Follow Carly on Instagram to get an idea of the kind of concepts and processes she is working through. Check out her website to have a look at what she describes as a more retrospective, consolidated view of her work.
