Call for creatives: Digital Superpower! Lab

The project is in collaboration with Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival and the Youth for Innovation Trust in their respective cities in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and focuses on citizen empowerment and gender safety in urban environments.

Successful applicants will join artist and creative technologist Ling Tan from UK design and build studio Umbrellium. Applicants must be between 18 to 24 years old and interested in interpreting mapped data in their own artistic medium – i.e. graphic design, data visualisation, performance-based, photography, storytelling and poetry.

Digital Superpower! Lab seeks to achieve the following:

• Empower women and the LGBTQ community (often most vulnerable in the inner city and southern African communities) to express their relationship with the city and their environment.
• Citizen empowerment through data and creative visualisation.
• Training young women and the LGBTQ creative community on digital technology.
• Empower communities in co-curated data and visualisations to change their worlds.

What the lab is about and what to expect:

• Participants will use a custom gesture-based data collection technology developed by Tan to explore and collect data surrounding gender safety in the urban centres of London, Bulawayo and Johannesburg.
• Participants will work online to compare and explore their findings across the cities.
• Participants will be guided in ways to map, visualise and narrativise their individual and collective data and findings in their own artistic medium (e.g. graphic design, data visualisation, performance, photography, storytelling, poetry, etc).
• Participants will receive a participation fee of £133 (about $185) and funds to cover data for online engagements.

Criteria

Applicants must meet the following criteria:

• Based in London, Bulawayo or Johannesburg.
• Be willing to engage in peer learning with one or more of their own community members (colleagues, friends or family) on the project.
• Be a woman, person identifying as a woman, trans, non-binary or gay.
• Must have a working mobile phone and computer.

Interested creatives can apply here before 23 August.

“We want to work with young creatives to make sense of important issues in their communities through exploring the use of citizen data collection as a tool to empower them to speak up and to advocate for change in their countries,” a joint statement reads.

Find more information about the call here.