Acclaimed Swiss digital artist Marc Lee presents Echo/Location, a new project developed specifically for the 2018 edition of the Fak’ugesi digital arts festival, with whom we also mark the triple anniversary of our Cairo (30 years), Delhi (10 years) and Johannesburg (20 years) offices through a residency involving young digital artists from Egypt, India, Mali, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Lee frames the work in the following way:

“We live in a globalised world that is becoming increasingly homogeneous. Languages, plant and animal species are continuously decreasing. Supermarkets, buildings and cities look more and more alike. The work deals with cultural diversity on the African continent and at the same time with the powerful homogenising forces that are being exerted on this diversity also in the social-digital realm, and poses questions about the meaning of this ever-increasing flattening of forms and images.”

In “Echo/Location” users can choose any location in Africa and move through stories posted from that geographic point by others on social networks like YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. Here these personal impressions are streamed in real time like windows to our changing world. The viewer participates in the social movements of our time and makes a journey into constantly new image and sound collages in which one experiences local, cultural and linguistic differences and at the same time more and more points of confluence and echo.

Lee will also be running a Master Class in the context of the Fak’ugesi festival, on the 31st of August at 1:30pm at the Tshimologong Precinct.

Lee has been creating network-oriented interactive art projects, interactive installations, media art, internet art, performance art and video art since 1999. He experiments with information and communication technologies and within his contemporary art practice, he reflects creative, cultural, social, economic and political aspects.

His works have been exhibited in major museums and new media art exhibitions including: ZKM Karlsruhe, New Museum New York, Transmediale Berlin, Ars Electronica Linz, HMKV Dortmund, HeK Basel, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Read_Me Festival Moscow, CeC Dehli, MoMA Shanghai, ICC Tokyo, Nam June Paik Art Center, Media Art Biennale and MMCA Seoul.

He lectures, teaches and holds workshops about art and software art in many schools including the China Academy of Art (CAA) Hangzhou, Strelka Moscow, Shanghai Institute of Visual Art (SIVA), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul and ZHdK Zurich.