Premium Connect
by Tabita Rezaire
Premium Connect, 2017, single-channel video (35mm / 16mm, HD), color, sound, 16:9; English and French; courtesy Tabita Rezaire
Premium Connect envisions a study of information and communication technologies (ICT). It explores African divination systems, the fungi underworld, ancestors’ communication, and quantum physics to (re)think our information conduits. Embracing the idea that ICT acts as a mirror for the organic world capable of healing or harming, depending on its usage and users, Premium Connect investigates the cybernetics spaces where the organic, technological, and spiritual worlds connect. How can we use biological and esoteric systems to fuel technological process of information, control, and governance? Overcoming the organism/spirit/device dichotomies, this work explores spiritual connections as communication networks and the possibilities of decolonial technologies.
Contrary to biased, Eurocentric thinking, our information super highway might find its roots in African spirituality. Significant research attributes the birth of computing sciences to African divination systems such as the Ifá system of the Yoruba people of East Africa, which appears to be the origin of binary mathematics, today the functioning principle of computing sciences. […]
In conversation with the Nigerian philosopher Sophie Oluwole, this video work is a study of dynamic networks from artificial, spiritual, and biological environments that digs into the politics of possibilities, where a mystico-techno-consciousness could nurture a mind-body-spirit-technology symbiosis.