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Video 1
Stephen Hobbs - collaborative work with Andre Pretorious
Out of Order - A User’s Guide to a Dysfunctional City, 1997

Originally conceived as a multimedia demonstration CD Rom, Hobbs and Pretorious collaborated for two years on an ad hoc basis to develop an expansive virtual landscape, composed from field photography of the city of Johannesburg. The digital collage created is indicative of an urban space in a state of disorder and decay. However, more subtly, the composite landscape is Johannesburg as muse, a concept consistent in all of Hobbs’ cultural production since 1994. Underlying the very basic click-through interactivity of the work is the idea that the user, navigating the city in Hobbs’ Volkswagen ‘Citi’ Golf, is embedded in the subjective experiences of Hobbs’ encounters with the city and suburbs of Johannesburg. For Hobbs, this project is experimental in nature, serving as a virtual solution to the notion of an artist’s retrospective, imbedding his video and film works in the fabric of the building or landscape from whence the artworks were ‘recorded’. In addition the animated and interactive capabilities of Macro Media Director 7 (in 1997) allowed for a range of Hobbs’ more conceptual ‘takes’ on the city to be proposed, for example, his ongoing interest in sign-less cities and erased road markings as evinced in Scene 2, of the CD Rom.

What intrigued Pretorious about the project was the creation of structured chaos. Users would have different experiences visiting the same locations whilst navigating through the city. Although the journey would appear to be out of control and random, the events and triggers are well-structured and eventually lead all the users to the same destination.

Given that this work was never fully realized as per the collaborators’ original objectives, it remains a fragment, perhaps a suitably subjective document to contemplate Johannesburg’s transition post apartheid.

Early on in his career, Stephen Hobbs recognised the need to produce and publish across the disciplines of artistic production curatorial practice and cultural management. He graduated from Wits University with a BFA (Hons) in 1994. He was the curator of the Market Theatre Galleries (Johannesburg) from 1994 to 2000. Since 2001, he has co-directed the artist collaborative The Trinity Session

Living and working in Johannesburg, Hobbs views the city as “an African metropolis of perplexing contradictions and unpredictable developments in the social, urban environment.” Johannesburg was once the powerhouse of South African business, its Manhattan of glittering skyscrapers, but in recent decades corporations have moved into the suburbs to escape high crime rates. After apartheid laws that forbade blacks from living in the city were scrapped, many made the inner city their home. Today, Johannesburg no longer has the feeling of a policed white capital that it once had; it is clearly an African city. It stands as a powerful index of transformation and is a site for innumerable transformative moments. Hobbs draws on urban vocabularies of images and signs to point to cities’ transformative qualities, which are often invisible and ineffable. He has worked with video, photography, and installation to “record” such “interstitial ensembles” as human interactions, meeting points, or merely the traces of sites of transformation in city environments.

Andre Pretorious is the owner of a new media company called StringLite which delivers services and products focused on electronic communication. He creates interactive multimedia projects both off- and online.

Other articles relating to this artist:

TAXI-002: Samson Mudzunga

Sasol Wax Art Awards

Keywords: David-Krut, Film, South-African, Stephen Hobbs