During my time in Durban I spontaneously joined a exhibition project called “bodyofwata” at TheOtherRoom gallery. Film maker Donnavan Orr and Media and Performance Artist Simphiwe Xulu were working on a exhibition inspired by the mythical figure of Mami Wata, an originally West African water spirit. They were interested about the spreading and appropriation of this belief within Africa and the rest of the world, which seemed somehow related with my research about the terrestrial and submarine internet cable system.
As a contribution to the exhibition I imagined a contemporary reincarnation of the spiritual entity Mami Wata as a digital entity: a tweetbot called mamidata_, now housing in the Twitter servers in San Francisco. During the exhibition you could have a tweet conversation with mamidata_. As an equivalent way of communication with the spiritual Mami Wata through telepathy, as it was believed in ancient times, you would see a visualisation of the route that your digital information took around the whole world in just seconds.
