Brenda Atkinson
Bleeding edge digital design company Delapse launched Insert, South Africa’s first CD ROM magazine, to the new cultural elite a few weeks ago, with a stomping party in a venue that Austin Powers would wet his pants to shag in.
But of course there was nothing as crude as shagging on the minds of those who attended, people so pretty and hip and self-contained my eyes were stinging. DJ G- Force and Jack Daniels fuelled much kissing of air and languid grins of recognition: Jo’burg’s digerati, and a few gate-crashing desperados, had found their new playground.
South Africa is sorely in need of competitive, locally produced magazines in the aspirational geek-funk, technophilic youth market, and Insert might be just what the future ordered. This market consists primarily of the 20- to 30-something white intelligentsia who have slipped into Generation Y as seamlessly as into cargo pants and fake fur trimmings.
They are the aggressive marketers of our visions of a tech-driven future, who believe that this future is interactive. They command substantial salaries for their skills in digital design, know that these salaries will grow as the rest of the world latches on to a digital-or-die culture, and take cucumber in their G&T’s. Their brows wrinkle slightly at the words “print media”.
As the first edition of Insert indicates, this is both their strength and their weakness. The visual presentation of the CD ROM cover, picked up again in the “Core” interface, is clean, minimal and deeply cool: a black babe of indeterminate gender but incontrovertible beauty is shot from the shoulders up, metallic-sheened skin swathed in a silver fake-fur collar. The graphic colours are white, cool grey, ox- blood red and deep burgundy.
“Core” enables the user to access four content components: dcor, art, fashion and food, as well as two other sections, titled “Craft” (a gallery of work by local artists and designers), and “People” (editorial, contributions and thanks).
The contents are easily navigable, thanks to explicit directions as well as fairly intuitive layout, and the interactive perks are fun and cleverly concepted: the Dcor section features a room filled with must- have furniture and understated designer knick-knacks like Le Corbusier chairs (as if), CD’s and so on. The programming allows the mobile reader to enter the room, move around it, zoom in and out on particular objects of desire, and also read information on the labels, type and price of the latter.
In the Art section, which features Stephen Cohen and Peet Pienaar posed respectively as their works Fly and Boerewors, you get to grab the artists (the fingers of the cursor hand actually fold when you do this), and rotate them to get a full view of their weirdly modified bodies.
And in Fashion, you can strip the two models – white woman, black man – but only to their designer underwear, and then re- dress them in the outfit of your choice. “Food”, which offers you everything for a dinner menu from the shopping list to the perfect timing schedule and related web links, features gorgeously shot clips of more trendy young things tormenting veggies and making cappucinos on gleaming designer coffee machines. Sonic input ranges from dialogue sound bytes to music.
Insert is very pretty, it’s a great deal of fun, but ultimately lacks a sense of substance or purpose, other than to underline that yes, we really like the layouts in Wallpaper and Nest, and to congeal the most superficial accomplishments and desires of Generation Y: label culture, taste fascism, aheadness achieved through carefully co-ordinated consumption. If the olives in the bruschetta don’t match the Bright House candles, you’ve failed as a host.
There’s more to Gen-Y than this, more that is positive, culturally engaged, witty, ground-breaking, radically productive. It’s more of this, I think, that Insert needs to offer its market: the generation that, at its best, has the power to generate new ways of thinking and perceiving everything in our world, from gender and racial politics to commerce and art.
It is, on the whole, non-racist, non-sexist and hungry for a better world order, one in which technology facilitates freedoms rather than prejudices. To an extent this is reflected in the “Craft” section, most notably in work by Minnette Vari, Velocity Afrika and Marcel Rossouw, but it should be a principle of this exciting production.
Insert can educate, rather than simply reflect or follow, and it can do so not by accident, but by design.