Homunculi of the digital city

Employing the media of video and installation, Homunculi of the Digital City explores what it means to live in a digitally-mediated city. In this body of work, I personify both the city and city dwellers as cyborgian characters, by drawing on Donna Haraway’s definition of the cyborg. I expand my personification further by employing the Homunculus from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust II (1950, originally published in 1832). I utilise Matthew Gandy, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie’s discussions around the broader city so to consider the material and immaterial elements that constitute it. The screens that populate contemporary cities embody both these elements: they are physical objects that perform invisible data, in the vein of Boris Groĭs’ analogy of an image file being analogous to a piece of music that needs to be performed in order to be sensible. By drawing on these frameworks, I position the city as a high density of screens that are physically ubiquitous, often a prosthetic, and function as a gateway to the immaterial elements of the city. This body of work was made as part of a Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Cape Town. Supervisors: Carine Zaayman and Fabian Saptouw.

Digital City Performance. 2019-2020. Video Installation

Homunculus Series. 2019-2020. Video Installation

Employing the medium of video, the Homunculus series explores what it means to live in a digitally-mediated city. In this series, I personify both the city and city dweller as cyborgian characters by drawing on Donna Haraway’s definition of the cyborg. I expand my personification further by employing the Homunculus from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust II (1950, originally published in 1832). I utilise Matthew Gandy, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie’s discussions around the broader city to identify the material and immaterial elements that constitute it. The screens that populate contemporary cities embody both these elements: they are physical objects that perform invisible data, in the vein of Boris Groĭs’ analogy of an image file being analogous to a piece of music that needs to be performed in order to be sensible. By drawing on these frameworks, I position the city as a high density of screens that are physically ubiquitous, often a prosthetic, and function as a gateway to the immaterial elements of the city. The first four videos in this series was made as part of a Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Cape Town. As the homunculus is an alchemic concept, these videos are classified according the four traditional elements.

Prosthetic in a Phial. 2019-2020. 02m 40s
Skylines. 2019-2020. 01m 10s
Ergonomically Designed Apparatus III (Homunculus). 2020