Screening: DSTV Multi Choice

Screening: DStv MultiChoice (2019-) is an ongoing artwork that forms part of my research into the social life of images. First installed physically in the Pretoria Arts Museum in 2019, the mixed-media installation – comprising numerous casts of destroyed and fragmented DStv decoders – responded to a 2019 viral episode where supporters of the popular South African musician, Steve Hofmeyr, smashed, destroyed, drowned, shot and braai-ed (barbequed) their decoders. These acts – that were then annunciated on social media platforms – took place in reaction to the removal of Hofmeyr from the DStv platform, who, to some, is an Afrikaans icon but to most, someone with racist tendencies. I asked if image clashes are bound to specific social imaginaries–in this case the everyday lifeworld of some Afrikaners–or embedded within a network of intersecting and overlapping imaginaries – interfaces?

I have since, through the artwork, become ever more concerned with the links between the body as living medium, iconoclastic acts and censorship, to which the word ‘screening’ in the title ambiguously suggests. But even more, ‘screening’ reflects my interest with digital display screens–to which much attention has been turned ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, take for instance the popular notion of the “black mirror”. The digital screen is also where/through/in-between my artwork has now shapeshifted. Thus, taking on a new form and interconnecting with new interfaces.

Is the screen a boundary between online and offline realms, or, encounters and congealing of various intermixed digital, analogue, and imaginative, immaterial interfaces?

What questions are raised in the ways in which viewers engage with artworks online? In the physical gallery space, viewers engage with Screening: DStv MultiChoice (2019-) in a bodily and sensual way, as they walk around the work in order to observe it and since the work occupies and alters architectural space. Although the materiality and texture of the installation may prompt viewers to physically touch the artwork, the sharp fragments and shards may prevent viewers from getting too close. Viewing the artwork via the screen too may bring with it its own layers of distancing and disconnectedness. At the same time, however, in order to observe the work online, touching–via the mouse, keyboard, touch-screen) is necessary. 

The layered, complex, (dis)connected and (in)coherent aspects of screens and interfaces articulate the fragmentary nature characterising the work. Instead of the photographing of the artwork serving as documentation –the artwork was photographed by the photographers body and equipment moving closer, then further, then closer, then further, then closer but kneeling, and so forth. Thus, what happens when viewers navigate the three-hundred-and-sixty degree view of Screening: DStv MultiChoice (2019-) online that articulates the various interfaces at play, namely, the screen, touching device, photographer’s body, tripod, camera, artwork, viewer’s body and imagination?