Issue [2] Open the Gates
Issue Editorial
Editorial by Issue II Editors: Bettina Malcomess and Pervaiz Khan
[…] is an online publication and peer reviewed platform for creative research realised in live, digital formats. For this second issue of […] the editors, Bettina Malcomess, Pervaiz Khan made an open call for creative work across a range of disciplines that responds to another call: open the gates. The digital editor, Tegan Bristow, has managed the overall realisation of the web design with the assistance of MA research candidates at the Wits School of Arts, Alana Blignaut and Andrea Hayes, alongside Riaan Pietersen an independent backend developer.
The theme, Open the Gates suggests an actual and metaphorical opening of new possibilities, new assemblages and relations within sites of knowledge production. The call asked for projects that re-imagine and re-think the manifestation of creative research within the framework of an online journal. Ellipses foregrounds questions of the creative act and the modes of representation and remediation necessary and possible in the spaces of contemporary knowledge production online. Tangential to this thematic are questions of how creative research is measured, conceived and produced within the academy. An opening of the institutional gates and the boundaries of disciplines opens possibilities for the emergence of new and multiple languages, forms and modes of presentation.
This second edition of […] has focused on the realisation of original creative research work within the digital platform, as well as the translation of existing work into digital formats. A number of proposals were received from a range of artistic and academic practitioners and researchers, from which a selection of 6 projects was made.
The editorial process has involved a sustained conversation across technical, theoretical and artistic languages in order to arrive at a unique structure for each project. For existing work, the digital realisation has meant much more than documentation of an existing piece (be it performative, narrative or archival work) but a thinking that embeds the project’s form within the multiple logics of the online platform. The projects span work engaging directly with the education system and the archive as forms of embodied knowledge. Other works explore the possibilities of digital affect and audience.
Sumeya Gasa, Shameelah Khan and Dylan Valley’s Songs At The Gates looks at the after effects of the 2015/16 protests on students. It is the beginnings of a polyphonic repository providing an online space for ongoing reflection. This project sits in conversation with Thuli Gamedze’s Rethinking Education as Conversation, a digital iteration of the artist and writer’s physical mind mapping works, now unfolding on a digital wall, to ask urgent questions about the decolonisation of the higher education system. Jurgen Meekel’s Palinopsia /After Image interrogates presence and absence through the appearance and gradual disappearance of death mask-like images. This along with other pieces bear out the particularity of digital epistemologies and ontologies within the twin conditions of permanence and ephemerality. Here, Felix Kawitzky and Marianne Thesen Law’s Portal: the letters presents an archive for a disappearance, somewhere between a fiction and research project, the work brings together several collaborators who playfully stage the points at which the language of research as ‘search’ break down. Jacaranda Time: Diagrams of Collaboration, a collaboration between Cameron Harris, Mwenya Kabwe, Sonja Radebe and Tegan Bristow, also reflects the complexities of the translation of a live performance project into an interactive online archive. Jonathan Kane’s 60+: Queer Old Joburg works with material from the Gay and Lesbian Archive to present a kind of digital derive in a daring non-linear format that collapses the timeline, the collection, the interview and the map.
Each of these projects search for a language with which to manifest creative research by practicing a mode of what Irit Rogof terms ’embodied criticality’: ‘a state of duality … from which one cannot exit or gain a critical distance … the point of criticality is not to find an answer but rather to access a different mode of inhabitation … ‘. Embodied Criticality is thus compared by Rogof to a form of smuggling, of being both inside and outside. As part of this continual questioning of the place and value of creative research within the academy […] has, with the permission of peer reviewers (some of whom have chosen to remain anonymous) published peer reviews alongside projects. The replies of makers to peer reviews will in some cases also be visible, making transparent the normally opaque workings of academic processes of the valuation of creative research.
Ellipses edition II speaks to the exciting potential to rethink disciplinary boundaries within the arts, but also between arts and sciences. It attempts to explore and cross the divide between the physical and material space of artistic, musical and performative practices, critical theory and digital dissemination.
Articles by
Cameron Harris
Articles by
Dylan Valley
Articles by
Felix Kawitzky
Articles by
Jonathan Cane
Articles by
Jurgen Meekel
Articles by
Marianne Thesen Law
Articles by
Mwenya B. Kabwe
Articles by
Shameelah Khan
Articles by
Sumeya Gasa
Articles by
Tegan Bristow
Articles by
Thulile Gamedze
Issue Editors
About
Alana Blignaut
About
Andrea Hayes
About
Mishka Naidoo
About
Tegan Bristow
About
Bettina Malcomess
About
Pervaiz Khan
Jacaranda Time: Diagrams of Collaboration
Exploring the formats and complexities of inter-disciplinary collaborative creative encounters.
“Our own order is disrupted when we take another’s routines and certainties” Quantum Of Disorder, Hediger, I & Schaschl, S. (2015)
Authors
Cameron Harris
Cameron Harris studied composition at the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Pennsylvania during which time his teachers included Nigel Osborne, John Casken, Edward Harper, James Primosch and Jay Reise. He was a Thouron fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and later the recipient of a Benjamin Franklin scholarship. He won the Network for New Music composition competition in Philadelphia and the David Halstead Music Prize for Composition at the University of Pennsylvania. Originally from the UK, Cameron has been based in South Africa since 2006 where he lectures in music at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He was the Chair of NewMusicSA, the South African section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, from 2007 – 2011 and has curated many festivals for the organization. His main interests are interactive electronic music composition and the history of electonic music.
Mwenya B. Kabwe
Tegan Bristow
Dr. Tegan Bristow is Fak’ugesi Principal Researcher & Senior Lecturer at the Wits School of the Arts – with a specialisation on African Art, Culture and Technology. Bristow additionally acts as Editor in Chief and Digital Editor of the Ellipses Journal for Creative Research. `Bristow directed the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival from 2016 to 2020 and now works closely between Fak’ugesi Festival, Tshimologong Innovation Precinct and the Wits School of Arts developing research on the Digital Creative Industries in Africa. In this work Bristow is currently (2021 – 2022) working in partnership with GIZ to map and develop the intermediary landscape of the digital cultural industry in Africa.
In 2021 Bristow won the National Science and Technology Forum Award for Sustainable Development in the Creative Industries for her work in co-founding and developing the Fak’ugesi Festival.
Digital Editor
Tegan Bristow
Peer Reviews
Peer Review
Kurt Campbell
This work (Diagrams of Collaboration) offers a past event (Jacaranda Time) that was performed in October 2017 as an online experience and repository. The imbricated nature of the data feeds-audio, visuals, texts- come together to offer the viewer the possibility of a 'remembrance' of the live event.
The idea of this digital instrument offering 'remembrance' as opposed to an archive or supplementation is used to denote the activities it requires (modulating sound clips, selecting interviews from the various collaborators etc) to comprehend the sum of the parts. It is true that Websites and CD ROMS offer similar navigation to access or manipulate data, but this project is something more akin to a collection of independent thoughts that escape the gravitational pull of the logic and order of a conventional digital platform meant to document a single performance.
In this work, time does not come to pass, but returns incrementally and consistently as the various elements of the work though finite, offer the viewer a variety of ways to re-listen, re-read and re-position one data stream in relation to the other. The generosity of offering the many voices that were part of the collaboration in a way that is not hierarchical is refreshing and speaks to the idea of a species of democratic collaboration that is elevated to the status of a ‘guiding ethics.’
Peer Review
Amie Soudien
“… Even the instruments they were playing, were being constructed while they were playing them.”
Cameron Harris
The interactive digital sonic and visual field Jacaranda Time: Diagrams of Collaboration is an open, discursive space in which an online audience can participate in the intimate space of post-collaboration reflection. As a member of this online audience, after a few minutes of orientation, I became comfortable with the site’s functions and soon found myself transfixed in the continuum of ‘Bird Sound’ to ‘Afternoon to Twilight’, the patter of Crackle Sound, and falling cyber jacarandas.
Mwenya Kabwe’s script, playing line by line, offers those experiencing Jacaranda Time a non-linear narrative with which to join the emotions evoked by its atmosphere. Without figurative images, the highly visual nature of Kabwe’s text prompts detailed imagined scenes of traveling individuals, making their way across a vast landscape. With the introduction of the voices of Mwenya Kabwe, Sonia Radebe, Cameron Harris, Tshego Khutsoane, and Tegan Bristow, these imagined scenes were both augmented and interrupted.
Jacaranda Time offers the online audience many ways in which to experience the interplay and between sound, text, and voice in the defined environment of a website, whilst giving them a sense of the unpredictability of ‘live’ interactivity at the performance at the Centre for the Less Good Idea. In the spirit of ‘Open the Gates’ of this issue of […], the very data informing the collaborative process of the original Jacaranda Time is made transparent.
Although some users of the website may have a limited understanding of the technical details of Jacaranda Time’s processes, the online audience nevertheless continually produces new iterations and variations of Jacaranda Time through interaction and play. While the artists reflect on their respective unfamiliarity with technology, or their delight in the newness of the collaborative process, the online audience is able to share, or in a small way, relate to these processes through the engagement with the site.
It is incredibly appealing to consider the coming together of people and ideas for a second time under new circumstances. Diagrams of Collaboration led me to consider the rarity of ‘reworking’ the core elements of a collaboration to develop something new, on an entirely different platform. In their interview, dancer and choreographer Sonia Radebe reflects:
“The most exciting, and the most challenging part of working with the sound and visual, and text, and movement, was finding the way in which each and every element of these worlds speak to each other. How they speak with each other, and in a few instances, for each other.”
As Radebe’s voice played, the humming, whirring, crackling sounds of Jacaranda Time intercepted and obscured their speech, meeting and finding themselves at odds and in harmony with one another, and I felt happily lost within the intermediary spaces of ‘liveness’ and ‘choreography’. In its entirety, engaging with Jacaranda Time was deeply immersive and affecting, and a pleasure to explore.

Abstract
Jacaranda Time: Diagrams of Collaboration asks questions concerning the formats and complexities of inter-disciplinary collaborative creative encounters. Exploring through the lens of Jacaranda Time, an inter-disciplinary performance developed in October 2017 as part the 2nd Season for the Centre for the Less Good Idea, what is presented in […]Ellipses is the original work’s data – its script, segments of its sound and code, alongside commentary on the experience of making and presenting the original work by all five collaborators. In the original Jacaranda Time Mwenya Kabwe’s poetic script (inspired by Changing Changing by Aracelis Girmay), Tegan Bristow’s interactive-software, Cameron Harris’s interactive sound composition, Tshego Khutsoane’s recital and Thandazile Sonia Radebe’s choreography and movement, led and fed the code driven interactive and experimental multi-media work. Outside of the complexities of collaboration across diverse creative disciplines – theatre, dance, interactive creative coding and electronic composition – the development of the work spoke strongly to the act and role of modulation and transversal. This online version of the project therefore explores collaborative encounters between distinct disciplines and the values of modulation and transversal, both as metaphor and in reality. Can you explain ‘transversal’ here… Modulation in electronics and tele-communications refers to use of a stable wave form (carrier signal) as a carrier for more complex information that is held in another wave form (modulating signal). The outcome is a new wave that allows the information to be moved and transmitted by the other. The original Jacaranda Time used Kabwe’s script as the basis from which to engage the aesthetics of transversal, migration, borders, blocking and flowing through space and in time, in the mythical and the real. This reflective exploration, takes further this unwinding and unpacking of transversed forms. With the implication and requirement (found in the commentary of the collaborators) for a participant performed version that may make bare the inconstancies. The intensity of making the original large-scale performed work – saw experimentation, design and performance take place almost simultaneously. This left the collaborators with the feeling that they had not fully grasped its outcomes. What was left was a sense of longing and a need to unpack its inner workings and learnings as a shared experience between them. Diagrams of Collaborations, therefore acts to sketch (a trimmed down single encounter) of a moment in this reflection and a re-joining of its raw materials – people, skill, technique, samples of text and data – meeting again on an online stage. The online audience can themselves ‘modulate’ the interactive elements by exploring how the data begins to overlap and inform a reflective exploratory whole. For example, raising the volume of the sound samples feeds colour data to the scene and changes the behaviour of the falling Jacaranda ‘blossoms’ (in the live performed version the blossoms responded to the dancer’s movements, which in turn led and modulated the live sound composition). The speed of the line by line flow of the script can be altered. The collaborator commentaries can be played over one another and are overlaid by the choice of sound samples.
Tegan Bristow
Peer Reviews
Peer Review
Kurt Campbell
This work (Diagrams of Collaboration) offers a past event (Jacaranda Time) that was performed in October 2017 as an online experience and repository. The imbricated nature of the data feeds-audio, visuals, texts- come together to offer the viewer the possibility of a 'remembrance' of the live event.
The idea of this digital instrument offering 'remembrance' as opposed to an archive or supplementation is used to denote the activities it requires (modulating sound clips, selecting interviews from the various collaborators etc) to comprehend the sum of the parts. It is true that Websites and CD ROMS offer similar navigation to access or manipulate data, but this project is something more akin to a collection of independent thoughts that escape the gravitational pull of the logic and order of a conventional digital platform meant to document a single performance.
In this work, time does not come to pass, but returns incrementally and consistently as the various elements of the work though finite, offer the viewer a variety of ways to re-listen, re-read and re-position one data stream in relation to the other. The generosity of offering the many voices that were part of the collaboration in a way that is not hierarchical is refreshing and speaks to the idea of a species of democratic collaboration that is elevated to the status of a ‘guiding ethics.’
Peer Review
Amie Soudien
“… Even the instruments they were playing, were being constructed while they were playing them.”
Cameron Harris
The interactive digital sonic and visual field Jacaranda Time: Diagrams of Collaboration is an open, discursive space in which an online audience can participate in the intimate space of post-collaboration reflection. As a member of this online audience, after a few minutes of orientation, I became comfortable with the site’s functions and soon found myself transfixed in the continuum of ‘Bird Sound’ to ‘Afternoon to Twilight’, the patter of Crackle Sound, and falling cyber jacarandas.
Mwenya Kabwe’s script, playing line by line, offers those experiencing Jacaranda Time a non-linear narrative with which to join the emotions evoked by its atmosphere. Without figurative images, the highly visual nature of Kabwe’s text prompts detailed imagined scenes of traveling individuals, making their way across a vast landscape. With the introduction of the voices of Mwenya Kabwe, Sonia Radebe, Cameron Harris, Tshego Khutsoane, and Tegan Bristow, these imagined scenes were both augmented and interrupted.
Jacaranda Time offers the online audience many ways in which to experience the interplay and between sound, text, and voice in the defined environment of a website, whilst giving them a sense of the unpredictability of ‘live’ interactivity at the performance at the Centre for the Less Good Idea. In the spirit of ‘Open the Gates’ of this issue of […], the very data informing the collaborative process of the original Jacaranda Time is made transparent.
Although some users of the website may have a limited understanding of the technical details of Jacaranda Time’s processes, the online audience nevertheless continually produces new iterations and variations of Jacaranda Time through interaction and play. While the artists reflect on their respective unfamiliarity with technology, or their delight in the newness of the collaborative process, the online audience is able to share, or in a small way, relate to these processes through the engagement with the site.
It is incredibly appealing to consider the coming together of people and ideas for a second time under new circumstances. Diagrams of Collaboration led me to consider the rarity of ‘reworking’ the core elements of a collaboration to develop something new, on an entirely different platform. In their interview, dancer and choreographer Sonia Radebe reflects:
“The most exciting, and the most challenging part of working with the sound and visual, and text, and movement, was finding the way in which each and every element of these worlds speak to each other. How they speak with each other, and in a few instances, for each other.”
As Radebe’s voice played, the humming, whirring, crackling sounds of Jacaranda Time intercepted and obscured their speech, meeting and finding themselves at odds and in harmony with one another, and I felt happily lost within the intermediary spaces of ‘liveness’ and ‘choreography’. In its entirety, engaging with Jacaranda Time was deeply immersive and affecting, and a pleasure to explore.