The challenge of Africa ArtBox | Artbox Digital

The challenge of Africa ArtBox

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Today, new working tools are emerging, offering various experimentation tracks and new ways to link various activity domains, with field trials unknown to us up to now. With this reality, each society must reconstruct itself in this new environment and based on its specificity (cultural, economic, politic, religious, etc.), own and transform these exogenous models, these new ways of thinking, these tools and eventually assume this ineluctable revolution.
These transformations did not spare the world of arts. They imposed new forms of work, new artistic creation possibilities, and transformed the relationship of the artist to his/her symbolic and imaginary space and the outside.
Thus, the various artistic disciplines are now facing new work instruments dedicated to artistic creation: from the increase in the power of the computers and the development of softwares manipulating images and sound, photos and videos or digital musical instruments which make musical creation easier to the artists to discovering new types of music (techno, electronic music, etc.).
The world of the arts is overwhelmed by new concepts, such as digital art, cyber-art, net-art, techno-art, and so forth, aiming at defining a completely different mode of artistic production, linked to the use of new medias. On the other part, the development of Internet, the increase of the bandwidth, the exponential growth of the internet users in the world have contributed to modifying the art market, with the apparition of collective art distribution networks, commercial galleries and on line individual blogs or galleries.

These new forms of artistic work and new concepts are conquering the major international cultural and artistic events: biennials, festivals and other cultural manifestations which are more and more oriented towards these emerging artistic forms of expression.

In Africa, the transformation introduced by these new paradigms are deeply felt, and despite the gap separating the continent from more developed regions such as Europe or North America, all the countries are in full mutation.
Making the most of it for Africa and insuring the place of artists from the continent in major international cultural events, more and more oriented towards these emerging forms of expression, is a real challenge! These artists, regrouping a large part of the African youth have a great capacity of adaptation to constraints and changes. Thus, with the exigences from this new society and before benefitting from better conditions, they are facing the challenges with a very intuitive approach, letting these new contemporary artistic expressions linked to digital technologies little by little emerge, in spite of everything.
To reinforce these dynamics, we only need to gather a number of conditions: meeting spaces to socialize research and share desires and concerns, a better access to information and knowledge, a place to promote visibility for the creations and better interact with co-citizen, means to demystify and better master these new technological tools; in other terms, possibilities to extend individual frontiers and integrate them in the large networks being created everywhere else.

This is Africa ArtBox’s challenge: contributing to these dynamics!

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