Man makes flute from own bone: Ralph Borland artist researcher activist

In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Dr Ralph Borland, an independent artist-researcher and curator based in Cape Town. Ralph has a degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town, a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. His PhD was a critique of first world design interventions in the developing world. His subsequent post-doctoral work at UCT focused on the African city and North-South knowledge inequalities. He has continued to purse his interest in democratisation and the creative use of emerging technologies with projects such as African Robots, his collaboration with Southern African street artists where he helped them introduce electronics and mechanics to their practice. His art-design piece, Suited for Subversion, a protective and performance suit for street protest in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. He co-curated the exhibition Design and Violence at the Science Gallery in Dublin in 2016 and Future Present: Design in a Time of Urgency at the Science Gallery in Detroit. He has just completed a fellowship in the Institute for Humanities in Africa at UCT which he concluded with the exhibition Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa which featured the remarkable collaborative work BoneFlute which we discuss in some detail in this podcast.
In this podcast, we discuss how Ralph came to art practice and his first degree, majoring in sculpture, in Fine Art at Michaelis. We examine his lateral move into electrical engineering with his PhD at Trinity and the curatorial work he did at the Dublin Science Gallery. We then unpack in detail his most recent collaborative, and ongoing artistic research project, with the orthopaedic surgeon Dr Rudolph Venter, the flutist, Alessandro Gigli, and the film-maker Dara Kell. Finally we consider the relationship between artistic practice, research, and activism.