sound – Ralph Borland Studio

From 2021 – 2023 I was a research fellow in the Future Hospitals project at HUMA – The Institute for Humanities in Africa at University of Cape Town. I contributed to this Pan-African research project investigating the use of new technologies in healthcare in Africa, with my project Bone Flute: a collaboration with an orthopaedic surgeon in a public hospital in Cape Town to produce a flute from a 3D-printed replica of my femur, obtained by medical scan.

A short film from the project made in collaboration with Dara Kell

You can read more about the project, which I presented in my exhibition AIAIA – Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa in fulfilment of my research post, on the project website boneflute.org, where I describe the entwinement of my personal experience as a medical patient during the course of my fellowship, with my research and artwork. The result is a story combining these threads, which you can read on the site.

The website text is drawn in part from a book chapter titled ‘Bone Flute: An Art-Science Research Project‘ (click the title to download a copy) exploring this combination of art-science, research and storytelling which I wrote for the series Biomedical Visualisation, in the 6th edition edited by Leonard Shapiro, published by Springer in September 2024.

In 2005 Earthworks Landscape Architects (ELA) invited me to work on the design for a new public space in Cape Town’s foreshore – land that was reclaimed from the sea within the last century. I produced a group of ghost shark sculptures, that swim through air 3 metres above the ground, pivoting to point into the wind like weathervanes. They emerge from a cobble pattern of stylised water swirls, designed by Diekie van Nieeuwenhuizen of ELA.

The sculptures make a sound when a strong wind blows, through wind-flutes built into their gills. I worked with the musician Brendon Bussy to design and make the flutes, and on the arrangements of tones across the sculptures. They have infrared sensors in their hollow noses, which move the flutes into position when a person passes below the shark. This layer of interaction is not operational; the square is not yet connected to the City’s electricity supply grid. The flutes are fixed ‘on’ at present, so if you visit the square on a windy day, you’ll hear the sharks sing. Cape Town gets very windy, especially in our springtime.

For more visit www.jettysquare.co.za