African Robots and SPACECRAFT are interventionist art projects that engage with street wire artists in Southern Africa to produce new forms of wire art that incorporate interactive electronics and science-fiction subject matter, and make use of new technologies for design and production (such as VR sculpting, 3D modeling and CNC processes). The project plays on the similarity between old school digital 3D wire frames and three-dimensional wire forms made by hand.
The intention of the projects is to celebrate wire art as a deeply-rooted vernacular medium that starts with children’s play, and becomes a source of income for adults who go on to become informal artisans. The project intends to elevate the artistic status of wire art, invite attention to it as a serious object of study, and to increase opportunities for income for wire artists.
Through collaboration, creative exchange, and the sharing of skills and knowledge on public platforms, its intention is to invigorate a market which is otherwise fairly saturated with existing designs, by catalysing the production of new designs for wire art. The project’s suggestion is that a new audience and new markets for wire art might be created through new subjects, and that our designs might infiltrate Southern African street wire art like a virus. It aims to elevate the status and incomes of street wire artists through collaboration, creative exchange, and the sharing of skills and knowledge.
We have received funding from a number of governmental and non-governmental sources to demonstrate the project’s potential, leveraging small funding to develop work that has appeared on international platforms and in the press. In the process we have directly supported the incomes of many informal sector street wire artists since the projects started in 2014.
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