 I'm sure a whole lot of you looking at you if I can see you through the light have experience with university structures either you've studied for a number of years or you've been lecturers like myself I also teach or working on research projects like a lot of the people we've seen now and we get very used to the particular structures and divisions that we have in our universities for instance we tend in our universities to divide fields of study according to different ways of understanding or seeing or researching the world for instance we would have a faculty of science and then we would have a faculty of humanities as if they're not connected and we would have a faculty of arts if we're lucky and these we really start taking for granted and they separated out in various ways sometimes we know the separation is geographic my own institution has five campuses that are scattered over the city and it's quite hard sometimes to get from the one to the other but someone was angry at that but also sometimes when these faculties or these different ways of understanding of the world come together in one space we start really to feel the psychological and the territorial clashes between them the two projects that I'd like to show you today really challenge those divisions and I'd like us to look through them quickly the first project I want to introduce you to is called Josie Rhythm Analogs it's a project that I started a number of years ago with a good friend Teresa Collins and we started by filming spaces in Johannesburg using time lapse photography filming these spaces for cycles of 24 hours and what we ended up seeing was that all of these spaces that we thought we knew quite well had hidden rhythms and hidden cycles that unfold throughout the day I then took this project a little bit further now moving from film into a bit more of a scientific investigation and I found a way of generating graphs that actually show us exactly the amount of movement that is happening in these places over time so to read these graphs is in a way very simple the lighter areas represent a lot of movement and then the darker areas represent a calm moments or quiet times in the day and you can see here the relationship between the films and the graphs if we synchronize them absolutely there's a moment coming now there where the taxis in this taxi rank all enter the rank at it's three o'clock in the morning they've been waiting outside since two o'clock and that's you can see how that's represented on the graphs so we have data this data can also be put on a time grid and you can see here how at a certain time between seven in the morning and nine in the morning in that same taxi space there's a lot of activity and it has a certain pattern to it at this stage though what was happening with the project was that it was moving from film which is a very visual understanding to more and more cerebral scientific kind of understanding and it was important for us then to move it back maybe into an understanding more of the body or of sound for that purpose we involved three really interesting musicians who helped us to take this data graph really and interpret it as a graphic score so that the musicians then started reading this graph really as music we had a performance then where the musicians would read the graph which was displayed in front of them so that the audience could also read it and the films were displayed behind the musicians and the audience had this very rich experience analyzing the graphs with their heads feeling the music with their ears and minds and bodies and integrating this whole experience in a way that usually would be separated out alright the second project that I'd like to show you quickly is a project called Uncles and Angels again it's a project that kind of moves between these modes of scientific and technological investigation and the kind of socially critical art I collaborated with this project with the choreographer and performer Nelly Siwek Klaba who is also from South Africa and the project basically it's a critique of certain aspects of how patriarchal societies treat feminine sexuality in Africa and in the West this particular technology that we're using involves having her perform in front of the screen while at the same time the image of her is captured by a camera and sent back you can see the interaction gets quite violent at some time but it gets sent back to the back of the screen and then she interacts with these kind of live projections that are created at the time a key aspect of this technology was a discovery that I made with optics which allowed us to get around a certain problem and I'm not sure if we're going to see that problem now will we be able to? there we are this is a very specific problem that we have with video alright you can see that's called, thank you, that's called video loop feedback and to get around this problem because our camera is pointing directly at the screen I developed a very simple technological solution which allowed the camera instead of seeing what the audience sees on the screen there the camera literally sees that which is just a black screen behind Nelly Siwek which allows me to then feed the clean signal back into the performance both of these projects have a certain way of moving very fluidly between social critique, artistic expression empirical science, technological innovation without really ever getting stuck between them and I think going back to my own institution right now which is in African University and your institutions here I would also qualify as being African institutions I think we need to think about what are these divisions between these different ways of understanding the world head, body, sound and so on why are they there? and well we know why they're there we've inherited them from the West but luckily we are not the West and I think we can eventually imagine a slightly different way of doing things thank you