Welcome to my research site, ‘Objects in development’. My name is Ralph Borland, and I am an artist, curator and researcher based in Cape Town, South Africa. My main art projects are African Robots, a collaboration with street wire artists in Southern Africa to create new forms of interactive art, and its sister project SPACECRAFT, which focuses on science fiction wire art. Our project Dubship I – Black Starliner was selected for the Dakar Biennial 2022. In 2016 I co-curated the exhibition Design and Violence at Science Gallery Dublin in collaboration with NY MoMA, and Future Present: Design in a Time of Urgency for Science Gallery Detroit in 2020. My art-design piece Suited for Subversion (2002) is in the permanent collection of the NY MoMA.

My most recent research post (from March 2021 – Feb 2023) was a fellowship with the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The close frame of my research was into the human implications of the role Artificial Intelligence (AI) may play in healthcare (particularly hospitals) in Africa. I was part of a team funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, under the title ‘Future Hospitals: 4IR and Ethics of Care in Africa‘. My wider remit was the role of the human in the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) in Africa, which brings this research into relationship with my creative work with other iconic technologies of the 4IR: Virtual Reality (VR), 3D printing and CNC processes, and interactive electronics. See under HUMA in the top menu for posts related to my research there; I produced the art-research piece Bone Flute, and showed it on the exhibition AIAIA – Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa.

I submitted my PhD, ‘Radical Plumbers and PlayPumps – Objects in development‘ to the School of Engineering at Trinity College, Dublin in 2011 – read more about it. My background is in Fine Art (I studied sculpture at UCT) and interactive telecommunications (my Master’s from New York University). I completed two postdoctoral fellowships at UCT, first at the African Centre for Cities (2013 – 2014) and subsequently on the international research project Global Arenas of Knowledge which investigated ‘Southern Theory‘ and resulted in the book Knowledge and Global Power – Making new sciences in the South (2019). I co-authored a paper ‘Southern Agency: Navigating Local and Global Imperatives in Climate Research‘ published by MIT Press’ Global Environmental Politics in August 2018, which resulted from this research.

The broad frame of my research, as represented in the title of this site, has been into the multifunctionality of objects – especially those that combine functions for the user with communication to audiences. I describe such objects, and our understanding of them, as in development – their production and study is an emerging area – and I’m particularly interested in the deployment of such objects in the South.