Jake Michael Singer

Promises of the City is a five-part photographic-epic performed in a cyclone of plastics and found objects, on the rooftop of a building in Johannesburg. Burst is one of the five digital memories of this event, which we are left with.

Sometime after the Fourth Industrial Revolution, human-entities navigated a frenzied, hyper-digital Johannesburg, encountering friends and foes. Is this a revolution of destruction or salvation? Escape or capture?

From an inversion traditional post-production techniques we see chromakey figures panic in a seemingly photoshopped environment. Our sense of reality segues into ambiguity with respect to the body-in-space and the photograph-as-document. I attempt to bridge the chasm between the performed and the photographed, the physical and the digital. 

I am interested in how our agency is transformed when the body is landscape and architecture is algorithm. How will this African metropolis adopt the Fourth Industrial Revolution?