A School for Vernacular Algorithms: Knowledge Transfer as a System and Aesthetic Algorithmic Encounter

Abstract

Bristow poses questions to technological futures through the lens of African cultural knowledge and pre-colonial knowledge systems from a Southern African standpoint. An exploration of practices that run from a reflection through decolonising methodologies as a cultural response to technology and neo-liberalism, to the significant contributions of the insurrectionary and vernacular as knowledge forms. Unpacked in light of the work titled School for Vernacular Algorithms, Bristow explores Indigenous knowledge transfer and the complex structures of intergenerational and technological knowledge as a system made visible through IsiZulu beadwork. In this, Bristow engages communal or egalitarian knowledge systems as an aesthetic algorithmic encounter that questions the origins and futures of contemporary computing and algorithmic thinking.