DIGITAL AFRICA
Digital Creation and Innovations in Africa

Bilingual Book (French/English) - Publication date: March 2013 - Publisher: MCD.

Digital Africa is a bilingual paper book published by the MCD (Musiques & Cultures Digitales) magazine in Paris, which presents a selection of African productions linking artistic creation to digital technologies. It was instigated by Karen Dermineur (guest Editor-in-Chief).

This publication provides an insightful view on a subject matter that has, so far, hardly been acknowledged or analysed. The paper version is accompanied by an online updated format (on the Digitalarti.com blog), which enables African professionals in the digital field to be referenced and make themselves known.

The main objective of this project is to present a qualitative approach to digital art practices in Africa. It will both give an international visibility to African digital artists and offer an outlook on the cultural diversity of a continent that provides a specific approach to art and digital media.

This is about portraying artists, presenting original digital works and initiatives, institutions, informal groups, the vision of curators and critics, spaces dedicated to creation and thoughts on digital practices, as well as key international events organized in Africa (festivals, biennials, meetings, etc.). The aim is also to establish a classification of the different initiatives according to the most popular inspiration themes (such as: identity, border, migration, violence, power, the city, etc.).

Karen Dermineur intends to present about forty portraits, practices, initiatives... The texts will be illustrated by logos and photographs of the artists, digital works, exhibitions, performances, spaces, etc

About ten feature articles on digital creation in Africa have also been commissioned from specialists: artists, academics, researchers, African art critics, whether living on the continent or part of the diaspora community. At the end of publication, the reader will find a bibliography of all references quoted in it and a single general index of the names, titles of works, names of places and entities, themes, etc.

This project, in its various aspects including concept, research, contacts, information and writing will be run by Karren Dermineur, thanks to her 10 years old ties with the African continent. Her sources of information are interpersonal networks, informal groups and the Internet. Karen Dermineur will manage the project from Senegal, from Paris (with the diaspora community) and from major African events dealing with art and digital culture.

Digital Africa Exhibition

For the launch of the journal, an exhibition will take place in Marseille in 2013 as part of the event "Marseille-Provence 2013, European Capital of Culture". This exhibition will be organised by MCD with Guillaume Renoud-Grappin (Planète Émergences), in collaboration with Karen Dermineur, together with a guest foreign curator, Tegan Bristow (Johannesburg, South Africa). 2 other events will take place in Paris and in Dakar.

The central theme of the exhibition is "Africa and social networks" and will present, in addition to a selection of artists and works featured in the paper publication, a number of initiatives and experiences around social networks on the Internet, mobile phones, etc. The aim will be to present projects that are growing thanks to and through these networks along African specificities and that respond to real local needs.

Once again, Karen Dermineur will deal with the information sources, establish contact with the leaders of these schemes, but also with computer scientists, developers, hackers working on free software and other alternatives. The study of these projects will form the basis for the production of the Marseille exhibition in 2013, designed to make the public aware about practices and uses of the latest technologies in Africa.

Associated partners:
Production MCD and partners: Digitalarti, Planète Émergences (Marseille-Provence 2013) and African partners (in progress).

Ongoing MCD contacts with : Mairie de Paris, Institut Français, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Région Île-de-France.

Team:
- MCD (Musiques & Cultures Digitales), Paris > www.digitalmcd.com
- Anne-Cécile Worms, Paris > Editor / MCD
- Laurent Diouf, Paris > Editor in Chief / MCD
- Karen Dermineur, Dakar >
Guest Editor in Chief & Co-Curator / Digitale Afrique
- Guillaume Renoud-Grappin, Paris >
Coordinator / Planète Émergences
- Tegan Bristow, Johannesburg > Guest Curator / Digital Art Division of the Wits School

Guest Editor-in-Chief - Biography:
Karen Dermineur is an "artist of the network": a multimedia author, independent curator of multimedia exhibitions, organiser of cultural and artistic events around digital creation and author of numerous articles on art and digital technologies. She lives and works in Paris and Dakar.
In 1996 she co-founded the international online creation platform "Incident.net". In 2002 and in 2004 she worked at the Dakar Biennial (Dak'Art) to present international digital creation to the public, in the Dak'Art_Lab. In 2004 she co-founded the GawLab collective in Dakar, and created the "Upgrade! Dakar" a node in the "Upgrade! International" network, in 2008, to report on the evolution of digital practices linked to free software. Since 2008, as part of her work with Trias Culture she has notably set up workshops in real time interactive creation. Since 2010, she has been organising the Désert Numérique Festival in Saint-Nazaire-le-Désert (Drôme region, France). She has been invited by MCD to be the guest Editor-in-Chief of the Digital Africa project.

> http://KRN.incident.net

Digital Africa main contact: KRN@digitalafrique.net